Are You Prepared to Measure Your Marketing Impact This Holiday?

The holiday season presents a significant opportunity for retailers to drive growth, increase sales, and expand their customer base. To make the most of this crucial period, it’s essential to adopt a data-driven approach that ensures that your marketing dollars are making an impact. It’s important that you set a successful measurement approach now so you can uncover opportunities and inefficiencies without having to worry if your data is correct.  

Here are the five steps you can take now to ensure your measurement approach is ready for the holiday season: 

Step 1: Identify Your Goals and Measurement Strategy 

To set a solid foundation for your marketing strategy this holiday season, start by clearly defining your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). Whether it’s increasing sales, boosting website traffic, or growing your email subscriber list, specific goals will guide your strategies and enable you to measure success accurately.  

If you’re focused on customer acquisition, analyze your target audience’s behavior, preferences, and shopping patterns from the previous the holiday season. This insight will inform your marketing tactics and help you drive new customer growth.  

If you have revenue KPIs, make sure to align on target thresholds for your measurement metric as competition increases. Selecting a comprehensive metric is crucial to ensure you are understanding the full impact of your marketing on the business. Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR) looks beyond traditional metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and last-click attribution to help you understand the true value of marketing investments across consumer touchpoints.  

Step 2: Leverage Measurement Tools 

Monitoring and optimizing your campaigns in real-time are crucial to make data-driven decisions. In any effective marketing measurement approach, marketers must choose the correct tools to measure effectively. If you’re relying on one measurement metric or tool, you could be missing the full picture. 

We suggest using a tool such as MAP (Unified Marketing Measurement), to gain a holistic understanding of your marketing investment’s impact. A comprehensive marketing platform like MAP allows clients to understand their impact in online and offline marketing efforts, incrementality of marketing, profitability, and their future customer value. Then, we suggest using tools such as Google Analytics or Adobe to understand your platform performance and support your daily optimizations and budget shifts throughout the holiday period. 

Leveraging a combination of tools allows you to understand your marketing performance from every facet and optimize your marketing budget by shifting resources to where they’ll have the most impact. 

Step 3: Prepare Your Data for Success 

Make sure your CRM lists are ready to go for the holiday season. Focus on segmenting your contacts based on factors such as country, age, and gender. From there, you can use your CRM to drive higher email open rates and click-through rates. 

With more brands competing for consumer attention during the holiday season, it’s important to find ways to make your ads stand out. We recommend leveraging the segments you create within your CRM to automate your social posts and deliver relevant, personalized content. 

Step 4: Align Your Measurement Approach to Your Media Plan 

The holiday season is a great time to test out new channels and high performing tactics to reach new consumers. As you look to incorporate new channels, it’s important that your measurement strategy is tailored to each new channel, providing you with the insights to understand what is working well and what needs to be optimized. Two tactics that could be helpful to build a measurement methodology around are influencer marketing and new paid social platform, Lemon8. 

Influencer marketing continues to be a powerful strategy, especially during the holiday season. Consider leveraging emerging influencer marketing platforms, such as Meta and Tiktok, that connect brands with relevant influencers and offer advanced tracking and analytics capabilities. However, it is important to note that while these tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated in capturing data, upper funnel and audience data still heavily rely on the influencer’s willingness to share this information. Therefore, it is crucial for brands to ensure that any partnership agreement includes a provision for the influencer to share post data once it goes live. Monitoring this data closely is recommended, particularly during the holiday season when the social space becomes more crowded. In cases where the post’s performance does not align with the partner’s usual views or clicks, it is advisable to proactively request added value or an additional organic share to optimize the campaign’s reach and engagement. 

Capturing bottom-funnel data can be challenging without providing exclusive promotions or incentives to the influencer’s audience that cannot be found elsewhere. When assessing the performance of influencer marketing initiatives, it is crucial to consider the type of influencer involved, as different influencer tiers yield varying outcomes. Since there is no universal measurement metric for influencers, the choice of metrics to track should align with the campaign’s objectives and influencer type. Macro influencers provide more brand awareness while micro-influencers provide more engagement. Tracking metrics such as brand mentions and sentiment within comments can provide valuable insights into macro influencers while conversion rates and average order value can provide performance understanding for micro-influencers. 

Step 5: Harness the Power of AI and Automation 

A few months ago, we wrote about how AI has revolutionized the marketing measurement landscape, empowering marketers with an array of robust tools and capabilities that have the potential to revolutionize their strategies. One of the key areas where AI is making a substantial impact is in data analysis and customer insights. By harnessing the power of machine learning algorithms, marketers can swiftly and efficiently analyze vast volumes of data. These algorithms could unveil intricate patterns, trends, and correlations within customer data, providing marketers with invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing habits. Armed with this knowledge, marketers can effectively segment their target audience, devise tailored marketing campaigns, and implement strategies that truly resonate with their customers. 

It’s important to note that while AI brings numerous benefits, ethical considerations, transparency, and customer privacy should be prioritized. Responsible use of AI in marketing ensures trust, respect, and compliance with regulations.  

Conclusion: 

The holiday season presents an incredible opportunity for marketers to drive growth and achieve their business goals. The outlined five tips can help marketers embrace a data-driven approach and optimize marketing campaigns to maximize return on investment during this crucial period. Stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional holiday experiences that leave a lasting impression on your target audience. Contact us to learn more about how you can win this holiday season!