COVID-19 has shocked the world and inevitably transformed how people work, shop and live. It not only sent economies spinning but also significantly impacted on how a wide range of advertisers are doing marketing. Influencer Marketing Hub recently unveiled COVID-19 Marketing Report saying 69% of brands indicated that they will decrease Ad Spend in 2020. And 74% of the firms they surveyed have slowed down their social media posting.
Photo by United Nations COVID-19 Response on Unsplash
Beyond all doubt, slashing marketing spend will ensure short term survival and send grappled business a slim chance of recovery. However, the rigorous measurement of your marketing performance and having every one dollar drive more sales are way more critical and essential than ever. In today’s post, We are going to talk about how to better evaluate marketing efficiency under COVID-19 pandemic.
Methodologies to Measure Marketing Efficiency
To evaluate the marketing performance and optimize channel mix, the most important question we need to answer entails what Return on Investment (ROI) we are getting for the money we spend on each channel. Marketing Mix Models and Multi-Touch Attribution are popular techniques that tend to provide the depth of insights required to answer this question.
I am more inclined to go with the Marketing Mix Model to evaluate marketing ROI during COVID-19 pandemic for two reasons.
First and foremost, Multi-Touch Attribution is a bottom-up approach to evaluating marketing efficacy. It is focused on online marketing and sales and better at analyzing real-time user level data. Rather than evaluating every touchpoint user takes towards final conversion, Marketing Mix Modeling takes more of a top-down and macro-level view. For this reason, not only marketing related factors, but also factors such as macro economy, seasonality, weather, and the competitive impact can be examined and captured. From this standpoint, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic is not within everyone’s normal control and MMM can better capture the effect from it.
Moreover, MTA is mostly focused on the digital ecosystem while MMM can easily cover more offline channels. In light of Coronavirus, people are stuck at home. This consequently drove TV viewership up. According to the latest forecast from eMarketer, traditional TV is expected to add 8.3 million U.S. viewers this year, and this would be the first time that traditional TV viewing has increased since 2012👀. As a result, MMM may be doing a better job to measure the efficacy of TV performance compared to MTA.
#ds-in-the-real-world #performance-marketing #data science