A Marketing Effectiveness Audit to help you see through the Effin' Fug.
How can a marketer get to grips with their brand’s Marketing Effectiveness?
What is the critical lever for the brand given its category? WARC’s Anatomy Of Effectiveness is 24 white papers long (!). Once engaged in the topic on Linkedin, one is inundated with the effectiveness debate...
…it’s an Effin’ Fug.
So we’ve developed Prizm: a Marketing Effectiveness Audit to see through the Effin' Fug. It’s the report you’ll actually want.
The premise of Prizm is to objectively analyse Creative, Media and Experience against Marketing Effectiveness best practice, comparing a brand to its category.
We do it this way because it highlights:
- Where a brand can steal the effectiveness march vs category
- Highlights effectiveness tenets that are less prevalent
- Prioritises must dos
Here is Prizm and how we are thinking about the components. Details below on how we go about each piece.
Creative
Enjoyably Distinctive
A brand needs to be distinctive and consistent, yes. We also steer our analysis of creative assets to capture that they are funny, show relatable situations and deploy characters or music to positive effect.
Source: Nielsen, Radio Stations, System 1
Category Entry Points
The degree to which a brand’s category entry points are communicated compared to its category. If you are in a category that has ‘value’ as it’s CEP - that needs to be communicated in 2022.
Source: Nielsen, Ehrenberg Mass
Channel Relevance
How a brand and category is taking advantage of the nuances of different media and platforms versus creating key assets and versioning. We have been finding that this is an area where brands can outmanoeuvre.
Source: Facebook Ad Library, Nielsen, TikTok Ad Library
Media
Balance of Brand & Activation
The classic. The average of 60%-70% allocated to brand spend is the established steer but brand’s all experience their own nuanced situation and would benefit from understanding how their immediate peers act.
Source: Nielsen
Share of something’
Buying a high share of voice versus market can often be unachievable. In our analysis we discover how to gain ‘share of something’. This is the degree to which a brand can achieve a disproportionate share of a moment, mode or environment.
Source: Nielsen, manual research and working with media partners
Attentive Reach
Reach based marketing isn’t equal. Reach benefits + attention creates heightened opportunity for impact. There is wealth of insight (thank you: ebiquity) to benchmark a channel mix when married with BARB and Nielsen.
Source: BARB, Nielsen, Ebiquity
Experience
Frictionless Journeys
Understand how easy it is for a consumer to find information and convert after taking common category searches - for example do landing pages make sense based on what was searched?
Source: SEM Rush, Similar Web
Use of Behavioural Nudges
Drawing upon the excellent Messy Middle paper by Google, we determine whether category takes advantage of our biases around social proof, authority, scarcity and the ‘power of now’.
Source: Manual website & app audit
Content Utility and Trust
The visibility and trustworthiness of domains - is this a category that demands a highly trusted domain and how well does its content rank for the top volume and high intent search terms.
Source: SemRush
How Prizm comes together
The above comes together in visualisations such as the below which form the start of a discussion and then open up to more detailed recommendations:
In the example Brand A has the greatest gaps versus its category in the balance of brand vs activation comms, enjoyably distinctive creative and signalling the appropriate category entry points. These are starting points to discuss priorities.
Likewise behavioural nudges are high for the brand, an area that could continue to be leaned upon or perhaps it’s creating a little friction in the journeys where the brand lags the category.
If you would like to help with your Effectiveness Fugg and make the right priority calls for your brand then please drop us a line.