How can you measure advertising effectiveness?

It’s very important that you are able to measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns to see how they match with your marketing and business goals. It allows marketeers to see the impact of their outreach and advertising campaigns identifying how to improve their advertising effectiveness. Being able to measure how effective advertising campaigns are also allows marketeers to see where they can improve, what is currently bringing in results, and new opportunities to explore through marketing campaigns.

But how can you tell if an ad is effective, and what actually is advertising effectiveness?

What is advertising effectiveness?

Advertising effectiveness relates to measuring and evaluating how a specific advertising campaign meets the goals outlined by customers. There are multiple ways in which businesses can measure the success of an advertising campaign, either through sales, the impact on the brand, or awareness of the company.

Methods of measuring advertising effectiveness

There is never one definitive option when it comes to measuring advertising effectiveness. However, there is a process you can use to help streamline measuring the effect of all your marketing campaigns. Even if the goal for each campaign varies. Here are some simple steps to follow.

Set clear goals

Before you start trying to measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, it’s important you clarify your goals first. What would it mean for your advertising to be effective for your business? It could be to track the conversions and sales of a campaign or to track the effect on brand awareness after an advertising campaign. The choice is completely up to you.

Analyse and collect your data

Before you start your advertising campaign, it’s important that you have the means and the right tools to collect data effectively. You need to highlight how you plan to collect and interpret your data so you can track the progress of your campaign at every step. Having data to start with also allows you to have a good starting point to compare your campaign data to as well and will help define your overarching goals.

Many marketing and sales teams usually use third-party tools to help track the data. Most third-party companies will provide specialised tools to help track specific metrics, whether its sales or over all brand health improvements. No matter how you track your data you need to make sure it aligns with your company goals and advertising goals.

Work out your audience size

Building from you data collection should enable you to work out your audience size. Defining the success of your advertising campaign is a subjective matter and is largely dependent on the size of the audience you are advertising to. Defining your audience size gives you a realistic idea of your potential reach and by extension, ROI.

By knowing the size of your audience, you can also begin to advertise towards the right audience. It’s a great sample size to analyse who is most receptive to your advertisement. From here, you can target and scale campaigns as is required.

Choose your frequency

In an advertisement campaign, frequency refers to the number of times the audience is exposed to said advertisement. It’s important to balance this factor as too little and your audience may not find you memorable enough to purchase. Too much and you risk annoying the audience, effectively becoming spam.

It is suggested that there are roughly 8 touchpoints to a sale in 2022. This is the number to be aiming for initially, however, this can depend on the audience and what you are advertising – that is why tracking frequency is so important. When the data is compiled, it will allow you to find that perfect frequency to advertise.

Decide on your mix

When advertising across various mediums, it can be difficult to track a cohesive overall impact. That’s where MMM, meaning marketing mix modelling, comes in. It’s an analysis method that’s been constructed to bring together the various elements of a campaign. From here, advertisers can determine which elements are contributing the most to the campaign, as well as the inverse.

Typical mediums used in the mix modelling include social media, traditional print ads, TV ads and direct email. The mix can optimise a campaign by showing you which mediums are working. Here’s how to do some marketing mix modelling step by step:
1. Collect audience data on a personal level
2. Check where the data is coming from
3. Choose the most effective medium for your campaign
4. Analyse the data by platform
5. Keep your brand at the forefront of your mind.

Campaign summary and overview

Once the aforementioned steps are completed, it will unlock the information needed to form the campaign’s executive summary. This pulls together all the important points of the campaign into a singular section. An effective summary should be comprised of the following points:
1. A business mission statement
2. The KPI’s of this mission
3. Customer pen portraits
4. How the campaign will resonate with the target audience, via content or other.
5. Don’t forget the omissions
6. Include a budget needed to achieve the mission
7. Who are the competition?

It is important to draw this information into one place for several reasons. Firstly, it’s an easy point of reference for one’s own note, either for reminders or as a solid bench mark moving forward with a campaign. Furthermore, if approval is required for the campaign, this is a sure-fire way to make pitching and justifying its worth a lot more straightforward.

What makes an effective advertising campaign?

Now we can measure advertising effectiveness, what elements make a successful advertising campaign?

There are multiple ways in which you can create an effective marketing campaign that reaches your audience and provides value to them that could lead to increased sales and brand loyalty and increased brand awareness. Here are a few tips to help make your advertising campaigns more effective.

Target the right audience

Make sure you know the demographics of your target audience before you start planning out your campaign. You want to target the correct audience as they will be more likely to respond to your messaging, create a sense of brand loyalty and make a purchase. Carefully analyse the age, gender, location and job roles of your target audience.

Align your ads with your business position

Aligning advertising with the company’s existing position is an important factor in making a campaign effective. By keeping this in mind, it ensures that the correct target audience is being advertised to. Thus, filling advertisements with the right personality that an audience identifies with, which makes conveying product or service superiority much easier.

Keep your messaging simple

Ever had trouble remembering someone’s name? It’s easily done and that is why you have to account for human nature when forming a message. It could be the best message in the world, but if it’s complex, it’s going to be difficult to retain. So, an effective campaign should have a simple message.

A good way to remember this tip is to use the KISS philosophy (keep it simple, stupid!). This applies across every channel of communications also. No matter if it’s digital or print, the messaging should be simple and consistent. Following this tip makes advertising stick longer, creating an internal touchpoint in the buyers consciousness.

Find your style

Think of your brand and what it represents. How does that manifest in its style? What personality would it have? When building your advertising, it’s important to find this personality but secondly, to make it likeable. Perfecting this can take time, but once found it should be stuck to. Changing this can affect the likability of a brand and destroy external image by confusing your target audience and make the overall message less memorable.

Credibility is key

Whilst advertising may secure you a large portion of business and first time buyers, it doesn’t in itself create brand advocates. This comes from the quality of what you are advertising and how it matches up with the expectations you set by the advertisement. That’s why defaulting to labelling your product as the best is dangerous, if it’s not true.

Representing the true nature of your product or service through advertising is essential for this reason. Failing to do so can backfire and turn potential customers to competition. It’s always better to be honest, open, and clear to manage your audience’s expectations.

Make selling easy

Effective messaging is important with advertisement, but this is only half of the job. Effective advertisement will get customers down the sales funnel as quickly as possible. To do this, the audience must be given an easy-to-follow trail that gets them into a purchase position.

Consider the path of the buyer and what they will need to know to keep moving down it. Does this start with a strong call to action? Do they need store hours, a number or email address? Do you need information from them? Making this information as accessible as possible invites them to buy from you and makes for much more effective content.

Check your competition

Competitor analysis is a must when forming an advertising campaign. It’s the only way to know what your competitors are up to, how they are attempting to stand out, and how to differentiate from them. It’s also a quick way to extrapolate what is effective in your field and what to avoid.

As well as using personal judgement, focus groups and split testing are other methods which can be used to measure the competitiveness of your advertising. Some useful factors to consider when comparing advertisement include:
– Uniqueness
– Memorability
– Credibility
– Incentive to purchase
– Repeatability

Professionalism is everything

This is about asking if your ad looks up to the standard of other ads on that platform. Aesthetically, do the graphics or content fit or do they fall short?

If the expertise is available, this is always a good thing to keep in house. That said, if the expertise is not existing, it’s worth going the extra mile and outsourcing this to someone who does, whether that be writing, graphics or artistic talent. When putting so much time and resources into the input of the campaign, Outsourcing aesthetic factors to professionals is a simple way to protect the investment and output of the campaign.

How to apply advertising campaigns to a business in 2022

In 2022, advertising campaigns are more competitive than ever- especially on the digital landscape. Forming and executing campaigns can seem like a lot of effort but ultimately this helps a business to grow in the right direction. As opposed to a shotgun approach, campaigns produces detailed insights into your own customer base. Applying this information to the business can accelerate growth and cement a brand within the target audience consciousness. It’s all about making the right noise to the right people.

How Nepa helps to make advertising more effective

Nepa is a leading consumer data insights agency. Rather than spending vast quantities of time and effort on performing your own research, we have the data already. This helps make forming advertising campaigns so much simpler and quickly gives advertisers the opportunity to nurture and grow their brand by skipping the hard parts.

To find out how to future-proof your advertising effectiveness, find out what consumers demand from brands in the future with our full guide into future advertising insights.