Barriers to Faster Optimization and How to Overcome Them

Marketers must optimize their digital advertising and marketing channels daily in order to be effective; but daily optimization proves difficult. Michele Szabocsik, Director of Product Marketing at Visual IQ explores how to overcome those barriers

In marketing, speed really matters. The faster you move, the better you’re able to keep pace with ever-evolving market conditions, competitive activities and consumer behaviors. A team’s ability to navigate these developments, change course as necessary and quickly capitalize on optimization opportunities are all keys to better performance, and better results.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

Download

Marketers already know this to be true: according to a recent study, 58% of marketers across the United States and United Kingdom agree that optimizing marketing channels on a daily basis or faster is critical, yet only one-third (33%) are able to do so today.

So, what’s keeping marketers from optimizing faster? Data proliferation, locked budgets, the cadence of available insights and inferior technology were all cited as top challenges. To move faster, marketers must remove the constraints of legacy processes and technologies that slow down their ability to turn insights into action. Here are some strategies that marketers must adopt in order to drive faster, more effective optimization:

Consolidate and deduplicate data across media and marketing channels

The customer journey is complex, spanning many different channels, devices and interactions. These touchpoints produce more interaction and audience data than ever before, but it’s stored in silos across disparate systems that make it hard to access, integrate and process data to take action. To move towards faster, more effective optimization, marketers must adopt nimble but comprehensive data collection practices that enable you to efficiently turn raw data into insights. The faster data can be consolidated, modeled and analyzed, the faster marketers have access to the fresh and accurate insights needed to fuel more effective optimization decisions.

Be flexible with ad budgets

To get the most from their investments, marketers must be able to quickly modify and pivot their advertising spend to the most effective tactics. Yet most marketers today have locked budgets that aren’t fluid, making it difficult to re-allocate budget on the fly. Similarly, rigid partner and agency contracts can also limit changes to budgets across advertising channels, tactics and campaigns. To move faster, marketers must make sure that flexibility is built into their ad budgets and contracts so they can quickly reallocate budgets both within and across channels. By preparing for potential budget shifts upfront, marketers will be able to seize on opportunities when they present themselves.

Seek attribution solutions that offer a daily modeling cadence

Most marketers agree that sophisticated media and marketing attribution is essential to understand the value of their marketing at a granular level in order to target audiences more effectively or optimize creative messaging and offers by audience segment, ultimately improving marketing return on investment. However, not all attribution solutions are created equal, so marketers should seek a solution that rebuilds algorithmic models on a daily basis to keep pace with the speed of marketing. A daily modeling cadence ensures marketers have the most up-to-date metrics to gain a deeper understanding of how customers and prospects are responding to current marketing and advertising tactics, and enable them to respond faster with the right message and offer.

Invest in advertising and marketing technologies

Lastly, marketers should invest in technologies like data management platforms (DMPs) that can enhance the attribution process by enabling audience insights, as well as programmatic buying platforms that accelerate the time in which optimizations are put into market. By integrating audience data and optimizing based on daily attributed measurement, your marketing machine can react quickly to deliver coordinated and relevant experiences that turn prospects into customers, and existing customers into more profitable ones.

Today’s marketers must gather data fast, learn fast and act fast. By adhering to these strategies, you’ll be able to move at the speed of consumers, competitors and the market, and drive significant improvements to your organization’s bottom line.