We all do digital marketing. It's a must. If you aren't digital, you don't exist in this world, and that trend is only getting stronger. We at Geber Consulting receive many requests for digital marketing training, from how to run a Facebook or LinkedIn group effectively to content and ad strategies.
One question however we get asked by every single client. "Now that we know how to do it, how do we measure it?"
Even the biggest firms in the world have trouble measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing. Some have given up. Others are paying hundreds and thousands of dollars a month for sophisticated software that crunches the numbers - and in the end leaves you as confused as before.
The team at Geber Brand Consulting has created a simple solution, which we call the Geber Strategy Diamond. It has two parts: the visual representation of your strategy in the diamond, and the software (provided by our partner Tengerdata) which captures the numbers.
Here's what it looks like in it's basic form:
Step 1: Defining Strategy
In essence, the diamond creates meaningful links between your digital and traditional assets and serves as the backbone of your strategy. The elements of the diamond vary from product to product, and it can be adapted to any industry.
Once you have set up the basic marketing and advertising strategy, we use predictive analytics to show how changes to individual components lead to different outcomes (i.e. sales)
Let's say you are marketing pet supplies. Your visual would be an Instagram account with cute puppy pics, your Facebook page about the product itself-or, say, "how to keep your pet happy." Your inbound would perhaps be an AMA session with a vet online, and your O2O an invitation on the product poster at the vet to like you on FB. The "Action" represents the ultimate metric you are looking for, most likely sales. But it could be anything, from signups to a newsletters, downloads, visits to a page, or meetings.
Once the strategy is defined, the diamond stays with you as a visual aid. Every month or quarter you feed the numbers into the spreadsheet we created, which also includes projection and benchmarking features. By the end of the year, not only do you have a record of everything you did, but you also have the numbers you need for reporting. With enough data, you can make projections like "by increasing our Instagram following by 100'000, we can increase sales by 15%".
Step 2: Sales Prediction
One of the challenges of marketing and advertising is measuring efficiency and ROI. For online only campaigns, measuring is relatively simple because we can count clicks. We are however in living in a world of transition. Brands still rely on offline AND online. Tracking offline advertisement campaigns is a major challenge. For example, analyzing the effectiveness of TV, radio or printed media ad campaigns is a hard problem. What's even worse is that the departments handling online and offline campaigns often don't talk to each other. Each gets assigned a budget, but no one can answer the simple question: which media should we focus on? Should we invest in more TV ads? How does our Facebook ad budget compare to our newspaper ads?
Geber Consulting has partnered with Tenger Data Technologies (TDT) to solve this problem in a flexible, highly customizable manner. TDT's highly interpretable linear regression machine learning model allows you to analyze the TV, Radio and Newspaper ad spending in a given market, compare it to online spending, or compare spending on different online platforms or a mix of online and offline, as well as predict the increase in sales from changes in each activity. Moreover, TDT wrapped this machine learning model in a self-contained software application. The software comes with “batteries included”, it will work on any PC. The app doesn't require any network connections or external dependencies. Simply loading the data in the app will produce the desired results.
Geber Consulting and TDT are offering a comprehensive marketing and advertising analytics consultation process that includes access to the machine learning software package for one year. We help you identify the right data, select the right metrics, and fully customize the predictive analytics model for your needs.