Half your media spend is wasted - which half is it?

How accurate data can help you funnel resources into more profitable campaigns

Justifying your marketing media spend budget is easier when you have robust data to back you up. Marketing practitioners know the truism: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half". Modern marketing metrics should mean you know more than John Wanamaker did when he said that. Despite marketing dashboards and various analytics, it's still hard for companies to pin down what went well. How do you know you are getting the right mix of media coverage? And are you wasting spend on channels, people or time slots that won’t deliver the results you’re looking for?

How to assess marketing ROI

OUR Advertising effectiveness model

Knowing who your target audience is and how to reach them is the foundation of improving your digital advertising effectiveness. With the emphasis on digital clicks to measure marketing success, it’s easy to forget that it’s not about reaching the most people - it’s about reaching the right ones.

Using your brand's historic advertising data, we can determine which of your campaign activities see the most significant ROI. Funnily enough, it's not always the 'best performing' campaign that generates the most recurring revenue.

You can reveal your best-performing campaigns through data modelling and media optimisation. This can help you set an accurate sales baseline for marketing campaigns and market share.

A media optimisation project

Another angle that gives insight is a media effectiveness and optimisation project. It provides solid evidence for developing your media schedule and offers clues on how much, where, and when you should advertise. We usually begin with a knowledge discovery project to take a full review of what has worked in the past to give direction in future campaigns.

How does assessing media roi work?

The first step in this project is accessing and cleaning up your advertising data. Datamine looks at metrics such as:

Time and date of advertisements
Mediums (video, written content, social media posts, etc)
Sub-channels used (e.g. which TV channel, which website, which newspaper)
Type of advertisement (campaign, product)
Physical layout of advertisements
Number of impressions
Customer and purchase information
Call centre information

This baseline can be interrogated to determine:

Who is buying what (and when) across the year
Whether new competitors have entered the market
Which media combinations are having a more direct effect on transaction volumes
The impact of different placement within a channel (e.g. sections of a newspaper)
How to reallocate spend for different times of the year to stay ahead of competitors and optimise for seasonality
How to adjust offers and experiment with alternative channels
What’s controllable and what’s not

Advertising is vital to successful marketing – but only if those dollars aren't wasted on the wrong audience. A key part of your research should include segmentation. Segmentation uses customer and market data to pinpoint your most lucrative customers. Download our guide today to learn more.