Attention will become the dominant advertising currency

There are two key reasons 2022 will be the year attention becomes the dominant advertising currency.

Firstly, disruption, from tighter privacy controls to cookie deprecation, is impacting how brands target consumers and measure performance in their digital campaigns. More than ever, brands in 2022 will be looking for other measures they can take to gauge performance in an accurate, privacy-friendly way. Rather than buying inventory blind, adding attention to the media measurement mix can help ensure accountability over spend.

Secondly, brands will continue to want to drive outcomes from spend. Putting it another way, if you’re advertising a new product, the goal isn’t to drive a specific number of impressions, ultimately, it’s to drive an outcome, like a sale. Attention metrics – such as audibility and screen touches, provide powerful new sets of data that are more predictive of an outcome – which brands can use to optimise their campaigns. Likewise, brands can achieve this without tracking consumers or requiring personal information.

The shift in focus to attention metrics, alongside advancements in areas such as contextual targeting, is the natural next step in providing advertisers with better quality inventory and stronger results. Privacy regulations and the deprecation of cookies are undoubtedly accelerating this change. However, the shift to attention as the industry’s new currency isn’t only reactive, but grows out of verification solutions. Advances in verification has continually improved the baseline quality for ads by tackling fraudsters, boosting safety, and providing brands with clarity over their ad performance.

Exchangewire.com – You can read the full article also here.

Marketing communications in the digital age evolve by the day. Getting and retaining customers is all about providing a great customer experience from first interaction throughout the buyer’s journey. Today, consumers wield all the power, and with just a quick skip, swipe, or scroll, they determine whether a brand stays relevant or not.

As marketers explore strategies to drive the right kind of engagement online, one critical discussion that always comes up is whether they should opt for multichannel or omnichannel marketing. But, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: consumers expect a quick and seamless experience across all digital marketing touchpoints.

That said, let’s discuss multichannel vs. omnichannel marketing to determine which of the two can provide a better customer experience. After all, great customer experience yields a competitive advantage.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel – What is the Difference?

«Multi» suggests «many» while «omni» suggests «all». However, the fundamental difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing has little to do with whether you’re engaging customers in several touchpoints or all touchpoints as they move down the sales funnel. Rather, it has to do with integration.

In multichannel marketing, the goal is to guide a consumer towards a particular goal. It focuses on getting them from one stage of the buyer’s journey to another by sending a standard message through individual channels. Let’s say you’re issuing a promo discount code for new users; multichannel marketing involves you advertising the same promo code on several channels like your blog, social media pages, and email newsletter.

Multichannel marketing segments direct and indirect customer interactions. Direct communications are where the company proactively reaches out to the customer through direct mail or message. Indirect interactions include content pushed through blogs, websites, or social media.

Even though the marketing channels belong to the same entity, they’re inherently isolated from one another. Each channel works in a silo, with its own strategy and goals. As a result, brands that rely on multichannel marketing tend to run into miscommunication and style inconsistencies between channels.

For customers, multichannel marketing can create a confusing, impersonal experience that leaves them feeling frustrated.

Now, unlike multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing has the customer at the center. It involves the seamless integration of branding and messaging across all touchpoints to create a more impactful customer experience. An omnichannel communication platform allows customers to determine how they’ll interact with your brand by offering:

• A consistent, identifiable brand voice
• Personalized messaging
• Content that is informed by past interactions with the brand

In other words, marketers take a step back and let users define the journey for themselves – but the trip is tailored to their likes and preferences. For example, a user might get an email announcing a new product that goes perfectly with another they’d previously bought. Instead of relaying the same message through other channels, your strategy might involve offering them a promo code for that exact product on Twitter and having them see a video of someone using the product on Facebook.

In both cases, the goal is to get customers to take a desired action (using a promo code). The difference is in the journey options you provide.

Without a display campaign, your marketing strategy is missing a crucial feature: its foundation

As a leader in programmatic advertising, Genius Monkey knows that a well-rounded strategy includes display first and then other programmatic services added on to complement display. In fact, data shows that display campaigns are the backbone of almost every successful digital marketing media plan.

Study results:

Audio touches 9% of all conversions

Display touches 58% of all conversions

Video touches 33% of all conversions

OTT/CTV touches 22% of all conversions

Retargeting, whether that be display, video, or a mix, touches 27% of all conversions

While data privacy concerns and the regulations designed to address them have been on the rise for a decade, the bold policy moves recently made by platforms like Apple, Google and Facebook have motivated marketers to seek better alternatives to a decomposing system of advertising measurement.

As with any industry problem this ubiquitous, solving the measurement dilemma for marketers could prove quite lucrative – and there is no shortage of vendors claiming to have the answer. As more brands embrace experimentation as a viable solution, many adtech providers have been quick to adapt their language to suggest they have just what marketers need.

At Measured, we are thrilled to see the industry warming up to incrementality testing and experiments. We began developing our methodologies and experiment designs more than five years ago, in anticipation of this very moment. However, marketers should take note: not all experiments are created equal – and very few of them measure the true incremental contribution of media to the business using your source of truth transaction data.

It’s vital that your experiments are rooted in proven scientific methodology and designed to provide reliable answers to the questions you need answered. Anything less could lead you down the wrong path, with serious business implications.

To ensure your ongoing media investment decisions are informed by reliable data insights, here are some critical features to consider as you evaluate potential partners for incrementality testing and experiment support.

· Are your experiments designed using proven test and control methodology? 

Measuring the true incremental contribution of a channel, campaign or tactic requires experiments rooted in proven test and control methodology. Sending two campaigns to the same audience to see which one “sticks” is not a sound experiment

To be scientifically significant, deploying a clean, uncontaminated control cohort that is an exact replica to the exposed audience (test cohort) is critical – and not easy to achieve. Experiment design involves carefully selecting and controlling all the different variables, then collecting data in very specific ways to unpack reads for each cohort and apply them to a cross-channel reporting framework.

**If you are only making comparisons and not using a credible testing methodology, you aren’t really running experiments. To get meaningful actionable insight, you need experiments carefully designed to measure your desired outcomes, using your preferred metrics/taxonomy.

· Are you really measuring the incremental contribution of media?

If you’re only running tests provided by platforms, you’re only looking at relative lift by a publisher who is also selling you advertising inventory. More advanced levels of experiment design and testing that incorporate business transaction data from a source of truth like your ecommerce platform are required to reveal the true incremental contribution of media to a guiding metric like ROAS, CPA, LTV or sales.

**If you are only using self-reported last-click attribution data from the platforms and not reconciling it with source of truth business transaction data, you are getting misguided recommendations that are not based on true incremental contribution.

· Is geo-testing part of the experiment strategy?

While in-platform conversion lift testing is still available on some channels, the disintegration of user-level tracking has made them less stable and the reporting less reliable. Anchored on 1st party data, geo-matched-market testing is a near-universal approach for measuring incrementality on almost any platform. For channels that don’t provide control-cell capabilities, geo-testing is the only approach.

If a measurement vendor says they can experiment for incrementality on channels like Google Adwords, Facebook or Pinterest, but they are not using geo-matched market methodology, they are merely using an existing campaign as a baseline, not deploying a true control cohort. This can only tell you if one campaign is more incremental than another, not the overall incrementality of the channel or tactic.

Geo experiments don’t require user-level data, but they can still reveal the incremental contribution of media to any metric that can be collected at the geo level. Brands we work with that have run geo-experiments in tandem with Facebook testing have revealed that, while Facebook attribution has gone down due to shrinking attribution windows and ID resolution challenges, contribution has actually remained steady.

**If you aren’t using geo-matched market testing capabilities you aren’t getting a true read on many platforms. It’s the only future-proof method of measurement that will keep delivering results as ID tracking and in-platform attribution methods decline.

It is usually the prerogative for the marketing team to drive inbound leads and get a larger percentage of the available online traffic to interact effectively with a brand. Inbound leads are leads that show interest in a brand’s products and services and they usually reach out with the goal of wanting more facts and information. If planned right, inbound leads or inbound callers can be made to convert faster than other traffic and audiences, this is where Call Analytics platforms can help.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Michael O’Connell, VP Marketing at AnyRoad

Call Analytics systems can play a crucial role in closing the marketing gaps, especially lags between different channels. This can lead to better planning and handling of inbound leads while also enhancing the marketing-sales relationship and alignment within a company.

Marketers today can integrate call analytics data into their existing martech stack to get a more comprehensive view of their customer buying journey. Why have call analytics platforms become more important to marketing and sales teams?

A few of the top benefits of using Call Analytics Systems include: 

• Improves multi-channel attribution: In a multichannel marketing and online selling world, prospects and leads land up on a brand’s page or website via various mediums; through social media pages, through an online ad, maybe even a landing page hosted somewhere external. By using the tracking analytics within call analytics systems and scripting the right marketing flow, marketers can identify which inbound leads came through which channel thereby assessing channel effectiveness and improving attribution models in many ways.
• Leads to optimized marketing and sales campaigns: When inbound leads or inbound calls are tracked through proper analytics methods and assessment systems, it is easier to identify what channel or messaging was resonating more with a particular prospect base, in the eventual term this can allow marketers to further the output of different campaigns and future marketing plans.
• Helps build a more unified view of the customer: Call analytics dashboards can easily be integrated with a company’s CRM or other marketing automation systems, thereby providing a more unified view of the customer profile and buying journey through a singular system. This can help scale enterprise sales and marketing models because it will allow marketing and sales leaders to identify what kind of personalization can play a key role in driving long-term customer conversations and benefits.
• Allows for better marketing budgeting models: A better attribution model that eventually leads to optimized future campaigns allows marketing teams to know where to allocate more resources and time. This is where marketing leaders can step in to reallocate budgets into those channels and marketing strategies that actually lead to better ROI and long-term customer relationships.
• Besides improving marketing-sales alignment, helps allocate quality leads to sales teams: Implementing a good call analytics platform to track how inbound leads are interacting with a brand and why can help marketers filter out high-quality leads faster and move the most-likely to purchase ones to sales reps for quicker action as a next step. In the long-term, besides driving better marketing-sales alignment, this can enhance overall sales productivity and leads to more customer wins. Seasoned marketing leaders usually implement IVR systems and intelligence call routine systems to track and automatically send high-quality leads to the right sales reps based on location or interest.
• Provides a better assessment of sales performance: Most sales leaders use call analytics systems to track their reps sales performance and to understand which reps or agents close more sales and how they do it. This can help sales leaders understand which sales reps need more training or support while allowing them to also assess what kind of conversation or sales tactic works well with which kind of customer.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Christina Richards, CMO at Virtana

Enterprise call analytics platforms can be beneficial to both sales and marketing teams. Improved processes and implementation techniques can drive organizational goals and ROI and help streamline the movement of prospects.

Leading marketers and sales people have been using call analytics solutions to drive better engagement. Call analytics systems allows marketing teams to adopt a data-driven approach calling as a channel while giving them the right triggers to push conversions at a lower CPL.

Understanding How Call Analytics Platforms Work

Call analytics platforms work by routing incoming marketing calls to the right person or channel. These platforms assign unique tracking digits to each marketing sources making it easier to identify which lead is calling from which source. These tracking digits capture the caller profile and other attribution data like name, location and more.

Sophisticated AI powered call analytics platforms today analyse conversations and provide prompts based on it to marketing and sales people. These platforms often use speech-to-text technology to help teams breakdown call conversations.

The data that call analytics platforms today can generate can help marketers measure performance across channels and also assess the quality of their multichannel traffic to lead to better optimization, decisions and plans in the future.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Johann Wrede, CMO at Xactly

Originally posted in Martech Series – You can read the full article also here.