Tag Archive for: marketing

Blog Posts

Brand tracking – your most valuable marketing tool

If you are new to marketing, or have just taken over a brand, then your first order of business should be to start brand tracking. Knowing the health of your and is a fundamental component when making business decisions.

In the field of marketing there are lots of different activities and tasks you should be doing to various degrees. But there is one thing you should never skimp on, and that’s your brand tracking. Knowing how consumers perceive your brand is the basis for all your business decisions, and without it you risk running away from your customers, rather than running towards them.

READ ALSO: Brand research: What is it & why is it important?

To drive sales you need to understand your customers

Sure, you need to do performance-focused activities – planning your sales funnel, customer journeys and all the things that drive sales. But before all that, you need to understand your customers opinion of your brand, as their opinion lays the foundation for how they prefer to interact with your business. Without that knowledge your performance marketing activities are like shooting arrows in the dark. Sure, you might hit your target, but with brand tracking you turn the lights on and can zoom in for a bullseye.

Many who have worked in the marketing industry for a longer time already know this, and probably already have a well developed procedure for continuously tracking their brand. But starting out, it can be hard to know exactly how to go about it, and what the most efficient and reliable method is.

READ ALSO: What is brand tracking and why is it important?

Continuous brand tracking keeps the lights on your brand

We at Nepa strive to make continuous brand tracking as easy and cost-efficient as possible for our clients. We want them to focus their efforts on performance based activities, with the assured knowledge that their brand is on track with their customers.

Brand tracking is the basics of brand management, but it should not constitute a major part of your working day. Make sure that you have the results at hand, so you can keep hitting the bullseye.

Nepa Brand Health Tracking drives your business forward.

Want to know more about Nepa Brand Health Tracking? Contact us today to speak with an expert!

Blog Posts

Forrester weighs in on marketing measurement and optimization

We were eager to see Forrester’s latest Now Tech: Marketing Measurement and Optimization Solutions, Q3 2019 report that was released last month. In part because we were hoping to see Nepa included in the vendor list (Spoiler Alert, we were!) but also because the report helps to increase understanding of the business impact of marketing with measurement and optimization tools – a topic that we care a lot about at Nepa.

Here are a few things that jumped out to us from the report and our take on them:

“21% of B2C marketing decision makers say that their firm is lacking the capability to measure marketing results”

It’s paradoxical that at a time when marketing activity generates more data than ever, marketers struggle more than ever to understand what is most effective to separate the signal from the noise.

Marketing measurement and optimization solutions such as Attribution Modeling, Marketing Mix Modeling, Path to Purchase, and Campaign Measurement all provide marketers with an understanding of what works best.

“A marketing measurement and optimization platform enables marketers to:
• Understand the business impact of marketing budgets;
• Determine the optimal mix of channels; and,
• Forecast results of alternative marketing plans.”

Today’s C-level executives expect all functions to be accountable for contribution to the firm’s financial performance. In response to this trend Marketing needs to go beyond “soft metrics” like impressions and communicate the business value of its efforts.
This type of analysis goes well beyond reporting up the chain – by connecting activity to financial performance through statistical techniques marketers also gain valuable simulation tools to optimize the media mix and predict the results of different tactics.

“Modernize Your Marketing Measurement Strategy”

In addition to providing a list of marketing measurement and optimization vendors, the report suggests all marketers and analytics professionals take a fresh look at their measurement approaches. Here’s the gist:

Experienced measurement users – seek out new approaches to unify siloed measurement approaches.

Measurement holdouts – Choose a partner now, predictive analytics are especially useful during economic slowdowns.

Smaller brands – The cost-benefit analysis of marketing measurement investments have shifted to favor adoption, even for marketers with smaller budgets.

All marketing teams – include “analytics literacy” on the team to utilize measurement and optimization tools to be more effectively and support the missionary aspect of marketing – communicating the benefits of the measurement program up and down the organization.

Technology is evolving rapidly as senior management becomes more and more insistent on understanding marketing ROI. It’s no longer enough to have a vague sense that on some level marketing drives sale. You have to know when, where, how, and how much. And you need to be constantly improving, based on incoming data and changes in the marketplace and shopper behavior.

At Nepa, we recognize that Forrester is highly influential across multiple industries and are pleased to have been included in their analytical coverage. This report serves to further confirm the growing maturity of the marketing measurement and optimization technologies, as well as an overview of vendors in the space, including Nepa.

Blog Posts

Why a recession is a good time to ramp up marketing

After a record 10-years plus of economic growth, the U.S. and other parts of the developed world are starting to worry about recession. If history is any guide, many retailers and CPGs will take a close look at their marketing spend as a potential source of savings should growth falter. In doing so, they may be missing an opportunity to invest for the long term and to build market share.

Companies have typically reacted in two ways to a slowdown: they cut costs across the board, including marketing, and they seek to optimize the remaining marketing spend, focusing on activation and ignoring brand. This is short sighted. Brand is a key determinant in the path to purchase, while brand loyalty is expensive and time-consuming to build, but easy to squander. As an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR – How to Market in a Downturn) put it, “Building and maintaining strong brands—ones that customers recognize and trust—remains one of the best ways to reduce business risk.”

READ ALSO: Power-up your Marketing Mix with brand expertise and data science

There are other advantages to continuing to maintain marketing spend during a slowdown. Competitors may cut back, allowing others to capture a larger share of voice. As demand for advertising space declines, media pricing becomes more favorable to the buyer, meaning you get more impact for the same amount of money, or the same amount of impact for less money. In short, there’s a chance to capture market share.

We know of one consumer retailer that decided to cut its media budget by about 15% and to reallocate significant parts of the remaining budget from brand building to activation. The idea was to invest more in price promotion, drive short-term sales, and cut costs. (The decision was not based on media or sales modeling optimizations.) The result was a drop in sales of almost 10% the following year and even more damage to the brand. Later analysis showed that media investment had contributed about 20% of sales and that investments in traditional brand building channels had been an important part of the program’s overall effectiveness.

In that same Harvard Business Review article, the author wrote that, “marketers may forget that rising sales aren’t caused by clever advertising and appealing products alone. Purchases depend on consumers’ having disposable income, feeling confident about their future, trusting in business and the economy, and embracing lifestyles and values that encourage consumption.” All these are challenged during a slowdown – making brand a more important factor in whether a customer stays with your product or finds an alternative.

“CMOs across the board are seeing shrinking budgets and increasing expectations. And with that, demand for more transparency around how their marketing investments are performing and effecting their long-term brand is more important than ever,” says Robert Beatus, Head of Research Design at Nepa. “Understanding today’s complex shoppers requires sophisticated analytical techniques like Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), Attribution Modelling and other emerging marketing analytics.”

READ ALSO: What is brand tracking and why is it important?

One of the most promising analytical methods to recently develop is the space of Path-to-Purchase (P2P) analytics. It helps marketers measure changes to shopper psychology, as priorities are reassessed and new behavior patterns emerge, based on the touchpoints and combinations of touchpoints they experience on the way to buying a product or service. In a recession, shoppers are more open to switching brands or retailers, and P2P can help identify the reasons for that switch. As it does so, it simultaneously improves the ability to invest in the touchpoints that increase conversion, always an important function, but even more important during a slowdown.

On the corporate balance sheet, marketing is often treated as an expense rather than as an investment. In practice, it is an investment in the future growth of the company. Investing in marketing during a recession may allow a retailer or CPG company to expand market share, attract new consumers, and position its products for faster growth when the recession ends.

Blog Posts

The Future of Marketing Mix Modelling

Marketing Mix Modelling has been available for over 30 years–but it’s now come into a new age brought forward by massive changes in the media landscape, easy access to large troves of data, advances in methodology and a greater need for organizations to optimize their marketing spends.

In this whitepaper team Nepa outlines

  • A brief history of marketing mix modelling and what is driving today’s demand
  • Why MMM is the best way to make informed media investments
  • How data integrations are making MMM more robust than ever
  • What’s next in MMM and use cases for the future

Download here


 

Blog Posts

Radio Advertising – from Good to Great

If you’ve lost sleep wondering how to make your radio advertisements great and missed the recent MTG breakfast seminar (perhaps due to the lost sleep), we’ve compiled three keys to make great radio advertising.

This isn’t fluff – Nepa and MTG radio have analyzed over 170 radio ads on 70 dimensions each to determine what makes a great radio ad.

This data was built over several years of collecting consumer reaction to advertising campaigns. By applying advanced modeling techniques, we’re able to determine what factors drive better advertising effectiveness and which don’t.

Let’s start with what doesn’t work – as this might be a little controversial – amusing or humoring people is not a straight path to effective radio advertising. That’s not to say that amusing people is bad, but if it’s your top priority – you are likely on the wrong track.

When we look at the data, the best way for marketers to increase overall ad performance in radio is to focus on three stages of the campaign ladder – observation, sender recall, and message recall.

And here are some tips on how to optimize each:

  • Observation – add a known song to create stopping power that grabs the listeners attention.
  • Sender recall – Don’t be shy.  Rather, clearly say who’s sending the message – this is most effectively done by adding a sound logo and clearly mention your brand name as early in the ad as possible.
  • Message recall – Don’t stop at your brand name – be sure to clearly mention your product or service.

To take your radio ad to the next level, remember the basics of advertising and don’t get lost in trying to amuse the audience.

Mastering your radio creative is a great start to effective marketing – but marketing today requires optimization of creative and spend across a growing number of channels.

Blog Posts

Common mistakes that will make your radio ad flop!

Nepa and MTG radio recently analyzed over 170 radio ads on 70 dimensions each to determine what makes, or breaks, a radio ad. In this post, we give you three clear tips on how to avoid creating a radio ad that makes for difficult conversations with your boss. When you’re done, be sure to pop over to our post on what makes a great radio ad.

You might find some of these tips surprising and contrary to the what you’ve read in other advertising discussions. For that reason, we think it’s especially important to note that this is not a mere set of opinions, but a list that is grounded in hard data and facts. Nepa and MTG radio have developed a large database of customer perceptions to radio advertisements. Nepa has applied advanced modeling techniques to determine what factors drive better advertising effectiveness and which don’t.

Here are some common mistakes that lead to radio ad flops:

  • Trying too hard to amuse the audience – Radio listeners tuned out of advertisements that included a role play, act or dialogue in the ad.
  • Too many details and information – The ads that included the most detail and information were also the least successful overall performers.

These two mistakes often go hand in hand – ads that include a role-play, act or dialogue contained too much information. When these mistakes are combined in one ad, it leaves consumers very confused and ultimately disliking the radio ad.

So, what to do instead? Keep it crisp and clear and most important of all, let the listener know who you are as early in the ad as possible.

Mastering your radio creative is a great start to effective marketing – but marketing today requires optimization of creative and spend across a growing number of channels.

Download our Marketing Optimization eBook for tips on how to master your marketing investments