In today’s market marketing teams are under more and more pressure to perform and get results. ROI is a magic word in marketing now-a-days, while budgets and resources are under pressure as well. In the meantime customers are holding back and getting less and less faithfull to just one brand. So, pressure is on for the marketing department, because you can only do so much to get better results.
There are several trends today which cause this higher pressure, says a paper by SAS.
- Consumers are more empowered then ever
- Data volumes are exploding
- New contact channels add complexity and dissonance
- You don’t control all the channels
- There’s more opportunity for confusion and noise
- Marketing organizations are drowning in data
How can marketers keep their head up in all this turmoil? How can they identify the best strategy that will deliver the best returns on from marketing investments?
Wilson Raj, Global Customer Intelligence Director at SAS shed his light on how to improve ROI on your marketing investments during a webinar sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association and SAS. Optimization is the keyword, he says.
“Typically, when marketers think of optimization, it is an afterthought,” Raj states.“Put in a program or execute a campaign, and then start optimizing it. That is a fallacy. We need to be optimizing across all the phases of marketing, from setting the right focus, to deciding what data pieces to use, to multichannel execution, and ensuring relevance and authenticity.”
The requirement to juggle multiple constraints and considerations is an inescapable part of the marketing equation. Marketing executives need a top-down, integrated marketing management approach that optimizes the value of all campaign activities. That’s exactly what marketing optimization does – it gives marketers the ability to plan and prioritize all customer interactions in a way that maximizes economic outcomes while balancing the capacity to deliver and the likelihood to respond.
A solid marketing optimization solution should enable marketers to do four key things:
- Flexibly define objectives and constraints, whether the goal is to maximize a positive attribute or minimize a negative one.
- Incorporate real-world contact policies, such as cross-business considerations (who gets the lead?), recency and frequency rules, and blocking policies.
- Understand the implications of changing any of the resources, objectives or constraints.
- Define and compare different scenarios to see which ones deliver the most desired outcomes.
“These capabilities help your organization move closer to the vision of an IMM process,” said Raj, “where you not only create positive customer impact, but you also build efficiencies into the operational process and improve financial outcomes.” Finally, a mathematical solution to the never-ending expectation on marketers to do more with less.
Download the whitepaper Improving ROI with Marketing Optimization here
