Digital advertising has declined nearly 20% YoY in the first half of 2020 due to widespread uncertainty around Covid-19 impact on ROI. Sales & Marketing is a major expense for brands in every industry with automotive, pharmaceutical, and retail sectors being among the highest-spending industries on advertising, but now that many businesses tightening their belts, marketers need to maximize efficiency of spend and measurement.
In addition, world-wide lockdowns in response to Covid-19 have spurred a once-in-a-lifetime migration to online purchasing and a shift of consumer attention to digital destinations overall. Businesses will need to transfer the bulk of their advertising initiatives to the channels that customers are frequenting most if they hope to remain relevant.
Brands stay relevant by honing brand experiences
With brand experience being a driving force behind brand differentiation, and brand differentiation being a driving force behind consumer choice, it makes sense that businesses that hope to grow profitably would put resources behind creating strong brand experiences.
Brand experience ultimately refers to the emotions and perceptions that customers have around a business. The goal for advertising professionals is to design a sensory experience via an advertisement that helps establish a meaningful relationship with customers.
Brand experience research
In order to build effective brand experiences, brands must conduct brand experience research. The resulting insights will help inform the design of ads to meet customer needs, leave the customer with a distinct and positive impression, and ultimately guide them to take the desired action (e.g. subscribe or purchase).
Plus, with more advertising going digital, how and where you reach your audience matters just as much as the ads themselves. Brand experience research can also help you lock onto the right channels.
Advertising effectiveness and brand experience research
Not only do the best digital advertisements deliver strong brand experiences, but they can also increase awareness and sales, build brand equity, and fortify customer loyalty. But unless you’re measuring your marketing efforts, you might as well be playing a blindfolded game of pin the tail on the donkey. That’s where ad effectiveness measurement comes in.
How do you measure advertising effectiveness?
The key to advertising effectiveness goes beyond the creative. There’s a lot more that goes into planning and launching a successful ad campaign. At a high level, there are four major “must-metrics” for measuring ad effectiveness.
1. Campaign Impact
Ads need to drive recall so that your brand is mentally available at a later point, namely at the time of purchase. The impact of your campaign can be assessed while in-flight by measuring KPIs like Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Favorability, and Purchase Intent.
2. Campaign Resonance
Ads needs to resonate with your target audience on the three Cs: clear, credible, and compelling. Powerful ads are differentiated by delivery (e.g. message, format, or creative) and brand distinctiveness.
3. Brand Fit
Ads must align with the identity of the brand. For instance, if your brand represents a stern, authoritative position in the market, it would be unwise to characterize your brand as a jester in advertising as this would create confusion and a diluted brand position.
4. Brand Favorability
Ads need to create appeal so that the brand is higher in the consideration set. This is particularly important for ads promoting products and services because without strong brand attribution, the ad could end up driving higher consideration of competitors with similar offerings.
While Campaign Impact is something that can really only be measured after the advertisement has been deployed, Campaign Resonance, Brand Fit, and Brand Favorability can and should be tested prior to the launch of the campaign while the advertisement is still in the iterative design phase.
Measuring ad effectiveness with Fuel Cycle
Traditional ad effectiveness measurement determines the overall performance of digital marketing campaigns, but as you can see, simply measuring the impact after deployment can only benefit the business so much. With Fuel Cycle’s ad effectiveness solution, Total Ad Performance, you can optimize campaigns in the design phase, assess campaigns in-flight, and track every point along your brand journey to ensure ultimate ROI on marketing investment.
If you’d like to see the ad effectiveness solution for yourself and discuss how it can help boost your marketing impact, reach out to our experts.
If you’d like to learn more, listen to the webinar where Fuel Cycle’s CRO Calista Corley and CPO Rick Kelly discussed the importance of measuring ad effectiveness in today’s market and how to seamlessly incorporate the Total Ad Performance solution into your existing marketing research process.
