Pasch Who Sold It?

Understanding How Marketing Channels Influence Sales
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5439-1617-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

Wondering How You Can Optimize Your Marketing Mix? As advertising choice and complexity increases, business managers need to upgrade their knowledge on how to refine their marketing strategy to meet the sales objectives of their business. Learn how to increase Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by: • Understanding how consumers shop and engage online with your brand • Capturing online consumer engagement and conversion data into Google Analytics • Killing Last-Click Attribution (LCA) models promoted by CRM platforms • Embracing cross-device, multi touch attribution models and reporting • Eliminating data silos and creating a unified view of your marketing investments. When you consider how much businesses spend on marketing each year, it makes sense for managers to read this book and embrace practical sales attribution models and concrete ways to help their business generate more sales from their marketing budgets.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pasch, Brian

Leseproben

It’s easy to identify an acquisition opportunity that could be flipped into a profitable business, and, in fact, this makes for exciting reality TV shows. It is generally not the product or location at fault, but poor execution.   I have several friends that are in the business of buying auto dealerships for their owners, and one of the key areas of weakness to identify is a lack of an effective marketing strategy. I was recently describing a situation where, during the due diligence phase, the existing owner was lamenting that his sales were poor and advertising was not working, but then he gave his son a pass when half of their auto products did not have online photos. The owner paid more attention to how he looked on TV than the quality of his online showroom. Easy pickings.   I can tell you what I would do if I bought a neglected store: I’d create the most compelling consumer interaction I could with great descriptions of products and services. I’d create marketing strategies where I dominated my local market and I’d have meaningful dialogues with former customers. I’d clean out the CRM system and assure processes were in place to have accurate information. I would then tackle ROAS.   Basically, business owners must remove their inadequacies that led to poor marketing results before analyzing the performance of their advertising. Obtaining the information needed to make smarter marketing decisions to increase ROAS will not come easily. This is stated upfront not to discourage you but to create realistic expectations. Business executives have no choice but to embrace multi-touch, cross-device consumer engagement data to create a competitive marketing edge, reduce ad waste, and increase the profitability of the organization.   Before we jump into the attribution technology and solutions, let’s take a few minutes to establish why determining marketing influence, sales attribution, and ROAS is not so easy. I have listed five reasons and I predict that members of the data science community will likely want to suggest additional items for my next revision:   A Sea of Change Ignoring a Strategic Asset The Crooked Yardstick Self-Inflicted Wounds Reliance on Email Attribution A Sea of Change
  Prior to the internet, business owners had it relatively easy when it came to planning and measuring their marketing investments. Radio, television, newspaper, magazines, direct mail, and call centers were at their disposal to communicate their brand message and to encourage consumers to act. The action encouraged in the marketing campaign could have been to join, enroll, subscribe, visit, or purchase from the company.   In the past, it was common for consumers to clip out a newspaper coupon or offer and bring it with them when they visited the retailer. The ROAS for the newspaper coupon would be calculated by adding up the revenue associated with consumers who presented the coupon in the store divided by the cost of the newspaper ad.   Marketing channels have since exploded. Prior to cable television, there were a limited number of TV channels which made television ad placement easier. Prior to cellular phones, consumers had a physical phone line associated with their home address to aid targeted telemarketing campaigns. Before the internet, new products introduced via direct mail used order forms which included tracking numbers to measure the influence of each offer on sales.   Reaching consumers today is more difficult than in the past due to the fragmentation of media, the advent of mobile technology, and the role of search engines and social media platform. Today, business owners have many more marketing channels to reach and influence their target audience. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, multiple search engines, video pre-roll networks, podcasts, blogs, electronic magazines, online news, email marketing, and mobile apps all compete for traditional media ad dollars.   Even traditional media buying has become more complicated. In major markets in the United States, there are multiple newspapers, radio stations, and hundreds of cable TV channels to choose from, not including the recent move to cordless television viewing on mobile devices. Online radio stations like Pandora and iHeartRadio further complicate marketing placements.   And there is a new wildcard in the marketing game. When consumers are influenced by marketing campaigns, today’s business owner must also come to terms with the consumer’s ability to immediately validate their marketing claims. Consumers’ online comments impact ROAS.   Consumers have research tools at their fingertips to read peer reviews, compare features and prices, and find the lowest shipping cost. A great product marketing campaign can implode if a YouTube video showing product weakness, defects, or misrepresentations goes viral. Before I book a hotel in a new city I always check TripAdvisor reviews; I never trust the fairytale images and descriptions on the hotel’s website.   With the multitude of marketing channels available today, it should be obvious that that a consumer will be touched by multiple marketing channels prior to his purchase. This scenario begs the question: Who Sold It? The answer to that question is the focus of this book. Ignoring A Strategic Asset
For some businesses, attributing a sale to a specific marketing channel is still easy. However, for most companies the question becomes extremely difficult due to the lack of data hygiene, data integration, education on marketing analytics, and standardized online engagement/tracking across competing advertising platforms. Let me make a quick point about data hygiene challenges because of the silos of marketing data that exist in most organizations. A recent article by Gil Press in Forbes entitled “Cleaning Big Data: Most Time-Consuming, Least Enjoyable Data Science Task, Survey Says” outlines the work that data scientists undertake each day. Nearly 80% of their time is involved with preparing and cleaning data.   Data hygiene is such an important part of creating a useable sales attribution model. In addition to improving processes for entering data, make it a priority to regularly send your CRM data to a third party to: Standardize address information and update records for address changes. Validate that email addresses and phone contact information is still associated with the consumer.   As business managers who start to implement multi-touch attribution models will quickly come to know, there is a significant cost attached to poor data hygiene practices for customer and sales data. Delays in knowing which marketing investments are working are often created by poor data hygiene.   Companies that sell products with longer sales cycles or who have higher product prices will likely see their customers utilize multiple sources to research their products before a purchase is made. The ROAS is not a simple calculation because many advertising investments touched the consumer. In these situations, data hygiene is even more important!   According to Google’s research1, a consumer is influenced by over 24 online and offline messages before a purchase of a new or used vehicle is made. A consumer may visit the auto manufacturer’s website, check safety ratings on Edmunds, and then validate prices on Cars.com, Autotrader, CarGurus, or lock in an upfront, market correct price at TrueCar.   Once a vehicle is chosen, consumers will then check reviews of the local dealership choices on Yelp, DealerRater, or Cars.com. At all points during the auto shopping journey, local dealers and manufacturers will be advertising vehicle sales and promotions on radio, television, social media, search engines, and YouTube. For auto dealership managers, they are even more eager to learn: Who Sold It?   Skeptics will say:   determining absolute influence is really impossible attributing a sale to a specific list of marketing channels is foolish marketing analytics are limited in their ability to span multiple website and mobile properties.   While these points have some elements of truth, it would be foolish for business owners to ignore the many ways they can obtain a meaningful view of the marketing channels that are influencing their customers and generating sales.   There are levers that increase sales outcomes. Each business must determine what those levers are to remain competitive and increase market share.   The amount of business intelligence that is lost each day, due to shortsighted data management practices, is staggering. During my interview with Pradeep Menon, a data scientist based in Singapore, he said something that struck me as true:   Many C-Level executives do not see their data as a strategic asset. –...