The Need to Measure from The Start for Advertising Effectiveness
In the quest for advertising effectiveness, starting with the end in mind is critical. Marketing measurement should never be an afterthought—it’s the foundation of successful communication planning.
Effective Marketing Measurement
Across any marketing campaign, no matter how big or small, evaluation measurement should always be the starting point. Without it featuring at the communication planning stage, there’s no way to know for sure whether an agency’s efforts go on to pay dividends once the campaign is over. Evaluating success relies on understanding where a brand stood before communications activity began and where it ended up after all activity ran its course. In essence, to ascertain whether a marketing campaign has influenced change, marketers must be able to measure said change. This means measuring the “before” is as crucial, if not more so, as measuring the “after”.
Not only should measurement be the starting point when planning a marketing campaign to be able to demonstrate effectiveness, by measuring early marketers can also identify problems in the first place The data brands measure often sheds light on problems that require their attention, such as when adam&eveDDB spotted the worrying truth hiding behind the AA’s impressive short-term metrics back in 2014 (Sussman, T. 2018). By analysing its long-term brand and commercial data more closely, the agency realised the brand was in crisis and required urgent intervention. Uncovering the insight hiding in the data they were tracking marked the start of their communications plan, which eventually resulted in them winning a Gold IPA Effectiveness Award four years later.
Our Process to Plan Communications for Advertising Effectiveness
At Golley Slater, we start every planning phase by analysing all the data already available about our client and their brand. This includes any data they themselves already measure, but also any data that is available externally concerning their company, their category, their consumers and any relevant cultural insights. If no data is available, we often commission bespoke research to mitigate this. Scouring through this data helps us identify the biggest challenges facing their brand, which we then set out to tackle with our communications strategy. Once the objectives for the campaign are clear and the relevant KPIs identified, we then ensure we capture baselines for these metrics before going live. This way, we can observe whether these important metrics shift following our campaign activity.
Top Tips to Plan and Evaluate your Marketing Campaign
In conclusion, measuring from the start is integral to effective evaluation and to improving effectiveness. Firstly, because it helps marketers identify urgent problems that need tackling, and secondly, because it allows them to evidence whether their marketing campaign activity influenced change.
When approaching measurement for your next marketing campaign:
- Assess what the brand is already measuring – and any other relevant data available
- Commission additional research if there’s still gaps in your knowledge
- Closely analyse this data to shed light on any problems and identify where to focus your efforts
- Plan your measurement strategy for evaluation before campaign launch
- Establish clear baselines to measure change against
However, while measuring from the start is certainly crucial, understanding how to interpret the data being measured can often be challenging. Our next article will explore the uses and limitations of creative testing as a means to predict and improve creative effectiveness.
References
Sussman, T. (2018). The AA: From spark-plugs to singalongs. London: WARC/IPA