As I sat down to write this blog about marketing in 2020, I reflected on 2019 and looked at all the great things my team accomplished and the challenges we overcame. I searched for and eventually identified the one variable that had the greatest impact on our ability to achieve our goals: making data-driven decisions.
What I found was not surprising but at the same time very impactful — our success wasn’t based on talent only (and believe me when I tell you I work with very talented marketers!) It actually stemmed from our willingness to leave behind “gut feelings” and embrace data-driven decisions (I know this doesn’t sound groundbreaking, but it’s hard). As marketers, we all need to be on the lookout for new trends and emerging tech that we can leverage to both improve our decision-making skills and help measure success.
Investing in Your Marketing Stack
Over the past year, my team and I combed the market for new learnings and technology, so that we could enhance our marketing stack to infuse our decisions with high-quality data. As the media landscape has evolved, we as marketers have had to change. We no longer can rely on traditional planning or metrics but are tasked with pushing boundaries and experimenting with new ideas. This makes sense because technology has changed the way we consume content and how we are exposed to advertising. Because of that, marketers have shifted away from traditional strategies for planning and measurement.
Clicks, viewability, and engagements are not a thing of the past but are a stepping stone to understanding true advertising performance. And marketers on the whole are aware of this … according to a recent study Cuebiq commissioned with 451 Research, Getting Real Enterprise Value from Location Data, marketers are finding more and more value in location data. Like my team, marketers in general are looking to enhance their tech stack. In terms of media, they are using location data to fill in the missing holes of the consumer journey, so they can better measure the success of their advertising dollars.
Using Offline Measurement in 2020
Marketers aren’t just using location data more; their expertise in using it has increased dramatically in the past year. If you’re familiar with location data, then you understand how important offline measurement is when measuring the success of your cross-channel advertising.
According to 451 Research, marketers are using location data primarily to solve complex problems and use cases like offline measurement. While understanding “total visit uplift” (total visits to a store generated from advertising) from a campaign is great, marketers are pushing the boundaries and want to understand more granular metrics. 71% of marketers say they will leverage location data to understand the incremental lift driven by their ad campaigns so they can calculate the true ROI. If you can unlock incrementality, you can understand whether your advertising is actually changing consumer behavior by driving additional visits to store, and to what extent. Marketers want more granular metrics so they can understand the full impact of their marketing dollars in the offline world and remove guesswork or gut-feeling decisions. 451 Research found that 65% of marketers want to focus on tying store visits driven by advertising to the incremental revenue their marketing dollars are generating — true ROI!
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Increasing Your Return on Ad Spend
As marketers continue to grow their expertise in location data and other emerging technologies, their needs will become more complex. A huge reason that location data has become more valuable is that it now shows “incremental lift,” which enterprise brands and marketers can easily activate for value. Incrementality is crucial because it helps calculate true ROI and provides recommendations on how to increase return on ad spend.
For the first time in the location data industry, advertising impact is being calculated at the consumer level and not as an aggregate measure for the entire campaign (as has been the standard until now with total visit uplift). This development means that marketers can now integrate data-driven activations into their strategies to increase their return on advertising spend (ROAS) by lowering their cost per acquisition (CPA) — again going from “gut feelings” to data-driven decisions.
So, as you enter this new year and the new decade, I hope that one variable driving your success will be location data. It will enhance your marketing stack so that you can better understand the offline impact of your marketing dollars.
To learn more about location data and how you can leverage offline measurement, set up a meeting with one of the incrementality experts on our team!
