Your best prospective customers have more channels available to them for their banking and investment needs than ever before. Understanding how the plethora of options influence and impact their decision-making, and ultimately their conversion from prospect to loyal customer, is not only important, it’s critical for financial marketers.
Measuring ROI is one of the biggest challenges financial institutions face today. In fact, less than 30% of marketers are highly confident they can measure ROI yet, according to HubSpot. Those that do measure ROI are 1.6 times more likely to get higher marketing budgets in return.
3 Reasons Measuring Marketing ROI Is Important
1. Understand the return on marketing investments. With resources invested in a marketing campaign, it’s critical to know the value of each investment for your financial institution, from an increase in brand awareness and consideration all the way through the funnel to specific investment behaviors, like applying for a loan or opening a money market account.
2. Validate media plans. Making sure a media plan is running according to plan is the first step to evaluating its performance. You need to know if you’re reaching the right audiences on quality inventory and if ad servers are delivering the planned number of impressions.
3. Inform effective and efficient optimization. Not all audience, channels and ad inventory are equal – some will almost always perform better than others. Knowing which potential customers respond best and what channels and inventory drive the highest response are critical to optimizing media plans.
Marketers have an abundance of options when it comes to selecting the right partner(s) and tools to measure campaign efforts. The following areas are where financial institutions need to have an especially critical eye when determining which partner to invest their – often limited – marketing dollars with.
What Type of Expertise to Look For
You need a partner with industry-leading data science experts and modelers. People who have spent years staying on top of new innovations in technology and have pushed the envelope in developing new solutions to accurately measure the ongoing and significant changes in the media environment.
A good partner has a staff with unparalleled statistical expertise and proven ROI solutions. A great partner has that plus access to an identity graph that provides the knowledge needed to confirm the right audiences were exposed to the ads, project all media delivery, analyze attribution, and provide incremental lift accurately, so the results you see reflect what actually occurred.
Methodology That Accounts for Various Nuances
Today’s consumer spends more time researching and transacting across multiple devices. Measuring the true ROI of marketing efforts is contingent upon the ability to tie both online and offline engagement and conversion behaviors to cross-channel exposures.
You need a methodology that accounts and controls for the unique, and comprehensive set of nuances of a campaign and includes weighting and projection to account for bias and coverage gaps.
A cross-environment identity graph that safely and accurately resolves anonymous activity to a household, regardless of where its members are or what devices are used enables your partner to help you link media exposures and action when available, or measure response across environments.
What’s An ID Graph?
An identity graph is a database of consumer online and offline behavior – anything from browsing history to device IDs to contact information – all connected back to an individual to form a complete profile.
Focus on Data Privacy and Security
Data quality, privacy and security should also be at the highest level of concern, and all parties should go to great lengths to maintain high standards in these areas. This means, at the point of collection, invalid traffic needs to be assigned for removal. IPs you don’t want to use should also be flagged, like those that are blacklisted, commercial, public, cell tower, etc. From there, households with outlying behaviors need to be identified for each campaign and removed from the analysis.
Finally, all incremental lift analyses need to be tested for statistical significance at multiple levels. While this process may be slightly more technical than your marketing team is used to being involved in, the data partner you work with should be able to explain their process clearly and simply, as well as what the outcomes mean for your marketing efforts.
Essential Identity Graph Characteristics
It’s essential that you work with a partner that has an accurate, proprietary, privacy-durable, and multi-environment ID graph. The graph should ingest all critical demographic, behavioral and device usage data required, which helps accurately connect campaign offline and online cross-device exposures to conversions, while enabling the most granular audience profiles of the consumers who are engaging.
An identity graph whose ingests are also validated against a trust set to ensure precise attribution across media types and offline/online channels while insulated from privacy changes delivers more accuracy, the ability to measure multiple channels in one view (not just one channel) and ensures stability and consistency of your norms and benchmarks over time.
Keys to Superior Marketing ROI
The reality is that better marketing leads to both an enhanced experience, and a superior ROI. Financial institutions can maximize their marketing potential by:
1. Identifying which audiences have the highest likelihood of responding to a media campaign, based on in-market behaviors, household characteristics, and past preferences.
2. Delivering a campaign that reaches those audiences through the right offline and online channels.
3. Validating how well a campaign was executed relative to its media plan.
4. Measuring the true effectiveness of the overall campaign using unique attribution and lift analysis methodology – including how specific aspects of the campaign like message, media channel and even media partner performed.
5. Optimizing the campaign based on that analysis of its performance and.
6. Calculating an accurate return on ad spend.
For more information, download a copy of the Claritas report The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Optimizing Campaign ROI, or listen to an episode of The Marketing Insider podcast called Real Ways to Really Increase Your ROI.