How Marketers can close the measurement confidence gap

As always data is a marketeer’s leading light.

In a world of exploding choice, fleeting loyalty, and increasing media fragmentation, there is no short-selling the importance of establishing and fortifying a brand’s relationship with its consumers.

To get a better, more complete view of consumers, marketers should focus on strategies that give them visibility into all engagements—not just channel- or platform-specific look-ins. Robust and accurate data that measures, optimizes and proves ROI, must be marketers’ north star for understanding and engaging the consumer and for measurement and attribution that enables the highest ROI.

Nielsen’s 2022 Annual Marketing Report revealed that Asia-Pacific marketers plan to significantly ramp up their ad spending on digital media platforms over the next year. Social media ad budgets, for example, will increase by up to 70%; closely followed by online and mobile display (68%); and online and mobile video (67%).

Despite these big plans for amplified advertising presence across paid digital channels, the report findings also highlighted a distinct lack of confidence among Asia Pacific marketers on their ability to adequately measure effectiveness and, ultimately, ROI.

Only 55% of Asia-Pacific marketers surveyed say they are confident in measuring ROI across social media—well below the global benchmark of 64%, and just two-in-five (42%) are confident in measuring full-funnel ROI (compared with 54% of global marketers).

Somewhat surprisingly, however, 77% of Asia-Pacific marketers expressed satisfaction with the tools they have to measure their marketing activities. The gap between confidence in full-funnel ROI measurement and overall martech satisfaction presents an opportunity for vendors to provide assurance in measurement capabilities where confidence is lackluster.

Lower full-funnel ROI confidence among marketers may stem from standard industry solutions not typically accounting for both upper- and lower-funnel marketing efforts. To address this issue, marketers can run Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) to optimize channel mix for short-term sales, and then optimize channel mix for awareness or other upper-funnel metrics. The results of these models can be weighted together to create a more balanced plan that supports both short-term needs and long-term ambitions.

As it always has been, data is a marketer‘s guiding light. But that data should be plugged into scalable marketing solutions that brands of all sizes can use to approach decisions with precision and arrive at reliable, growth-driving outcomes.

Get the full report here.