Many marketers are faced with the challenge of how to optimize their media campaigns to achieve more impactful results. Fortunately, optimizing them is an art that can be refined with strategies backed by solid research.
In this article, we’ll explore some strategies that will help you achieve better results and avoid the pitfalls that compromise ROI.
What You Need to Know About Media Campaigns and ROI
First of all, it is worth remembering that media campaigns are not always just about online activation. More than that, they are structured marketing initiatives that involve the promotion of products, services or messages through various channels, such as online advertising, social media, radio, television and others.
Optimizing these campaigns is essential to ensure that your marketing efforts reach their maximum potential. And to calculate this, we have the return on investment, known as ROI, which, due to the influence it has on revenue generation and the impact on costs, measures the total return generated in relation to the investment made in these activities.
It, in turn, is an essential metric that measures the effectiveness of media campaigns, indicating the profit generated in relation to advertising costs. The higher the ROI, the more efficient the conversion of investments into revenue.
To calculate ROI, simply divide the profit obtained by the campaign by the investment made in it and multiply the result by 100 to obtain the percentage. This way, the formula is:
ROI = [(Profit - Investment) / Investment] * 100
Complement your knowledge on the topic:
How Digital Maturity Will Increase Your ROI;
Gaps in marketing budgets
Knowing this, the returns on investment made in campaigns are not always positive. According to a report released by Nielsen , around half of marketing professionals do not invest enough to obtain maximum ROI from each channel.
While poor ROI can lead brands to cut back on spending, Nielsen has found that increased investment is often needed to boost returns. The concept, dubbed the “50-50-50 Gap,” highlights that while 50% of media plans are underinvested by a median of 50%, ROI can improve by 50% with the right budget.
In other words, these efforts need to be greater if the focus is to maintain growth and generate singapore phone number example more returns. Investing in the right target audience, for example, is essential to increase ROI and expand the reach of your brand or product.
This goes beyond just creating publications, but understanding the channels to start strategies and measure the correct KPIs. But, after all, how do you maximize ROI?
Recommendations to maximize your returns
The Nielsen ROI Report provides insights and recommendations for increasing ROI in several areas of marketing, including:
Full-funnel marketing, which is basically an approach that targets audiences at different stages of the buying process;
Emerging media, which is nothing more than exploring new platforms and channels to reach target audiences more effectively;
Ad sales growth strategy, focusing on strategies that drive sales and maximize conversion;
Audience measurement using accurate data to better understand interaction with campaigns and adjust segmentation.
Additionally, Imran Hirani, vice president of media and advertiser analytics at Nielsen, stressed the importance of investing wisely and balancing upper and lower tunnel initiatives to reach the right audiences and maximize ROI.
However, MATH has also put together some recommendations that maximize returns and can help you with business strategies focused on improving your media campaigns. Start by:
Using Marketing Mix Modeling
This can be an advanced strategy that helps you understand how different marketing channels interact to influence ROI.
Marketing mix modeling models analyze the relative impact of each channel, allowing precise adjustments in budget allocations to optimize results.
At MATH, we have already applied MMM as part of our business, and you can check out the results of this through the case study with Banco BV . Or, if you prefer, listen to the full podcast by clicking here .
Brand Impact Studies and Ad Rankings
Conducting brand impact studies can be a powerful way to assess how campaigns affect brand perception. But read the hyperlinked content to see what we’re talking about.
After that, understand that by combining these studies with ad rankings, it is possible to identify which ads generate the best responses from consumers and direct resources to those that are most likely to boost ROI.
Marketing plans and customer source spend data
Building solid, data-driven marketing plans is essential to optimizing ROI. By tracking customer source spend, you can determine which channels contribute most to conversions, allowing you to target your resources more effectively.
Media attribution studies
With this strategy, you will be able to understand how each point of contact with the customer contributes to conversion. This means improved decision-making and how to distribute the budget between different channels to obtain the best ROI.
See more at: What is Media Attribution and what is its value for your business?
Avoiding gaps in budgets and marketing strategies
Finding the gaps was easy, but avoiding them to the point where they do not compromise ROI is essential so that the recommendations above can be applied in an even more transparent way to achieve success.
With that in mind, reinforce some points:
Have your goals clearly defined and align them with your spending strategies;
Conduct audience research and get to know your audience in depth to effectively target your campaigns;
Allocate adequate budgets, investing enough to maximize the impact of campaigns;
Diversify channels and explore a variety of media channels to identify the most effective ones for your target audience;
Monitor and adjust regularly! Regularly analyzing campaign performance and making adjustments as needed is the key to a good ROI.
Keeping this in mind and the fact that optimizing media campaigns requires a strategic approach based on research can help you improve these actions and, consequently, achieve better results.
Read also: 5 mistakes that waste media budget and how to solve each one
After all, media campaigns, ROI assessment, incorporation of good insights as in this content and the adoption of advanced approaches, such as Marketing Mix Modeling, Brand Impact Studies, Marketing Plans, Media Attribution Studies and Ad Classifications are fundamental steps to improve the performance of your campaigns.
By adopting a balanced strategy, investing wisely and focusing on your target audience will help you overcome gaps in budgets and strategies that compromise ROI. This is the only way to achieve exceptional performance in media campaigns.