How is the marketing landscape going to look after COVID-19? Should businesses go back to following the same strategies that worked for them in the past, or have we entered into a whole new territory? 

Realistically, both of those assessments are correct. Following marketing best practices is still important, yet much has changed about what businesses should prioritize and focus on. Arguably the most important tactic that will help businesses navigate the post-pandemic ecosystem is monitoring marketing ROI. Here’s why:

Now is Not the Time to Take a Break

Many businesses have downscaled their marketing efforts significantly since the pandemic began. It just didn’t seem like the right time to be pushing the public into buying products and services. 

Now we’re many months down the road and the economy is still running. The vast majority of marketing organizations that took a break at the onset of COVID-19 have returned to work. Many never rolled back their initiatives. According to Advertiser Perceptions, only one in 10 new product or service launches have been canceled for 2020; 41% are proceeding as planned, and 48% were simply pushed to the second half of the year.

While there are, of course, plenty of businesses that are still in survival mode, many are not. Influencer Marketing Hub’s recent Coronavirus Marketing & Ad Spend Impact Report indicates that one in four companies are set to increase their marketing activities this year. So if your competitors aren’t taking a break, why should you?

A large number of CMOs are investing heavily right now. If you want to keep up with your competition—or even outpace and outperform them—you need to ramp up your performance monitoring and optimize your marketing strategy post-pandemic.

You Can’t Rely on Past Performance Data

Previous campaign performance has always been a valuable indicator of what to expect from your current efforts. However, that’s all completely changed. Adapting to new economic and societal norms is bringing businesses into whole new territory.

Marketers now are changing which channels they invest in and how much budget they allocate towards each. IAB’s COVID Impact on Ad Spend Report documents that many brands expect to increase their spend across digital channels in the second half of 2020, including CTV/OTT, digital video, social media, podcasts, digital audio, and paid search.

With that in mind, it’s safe to say that your previous marketing results won’t tell you much about how your campaigns will perform right now. Metrics tracking lead generation, conversions, sales, and retention can be drastically different from what they were back in January. The only way to know if your current marketing efforts are effective is by paying close attention to real-time performance trends. 

Consumer Preferences Are Changing Quickly

The global pandemic has led to drastic changes in consumer sentiment. If you want your marketing message to resonate with your target audiences, you need to continuously adapt it to their current preferences. You’ve probably seen a lot of marketers already doing this with new advertisements. Businesses are going out of their way to show how they care and help their communities—those in the restaurant and travel industries, for instance, have been highlighting their sanitation practices to ease consumer fears. 

As the pandemic continues to unfold, preferences among consumer groups change week-to-week (and almost day-to-day!) The best way to ensure your marketing message is still relevant in the long run is by constantly and maniacally monitoring performance.

According to a recent Media Frenzy Global survey, 47% of US consumers are interested in reading or hearing news that is not related to the pandemic, and 45% also say they want to be inspired by brands so they can be hopeful about the future. Your brand can cater to these changing sentiments, but only if you’re closely observing audience reactions and adapting accordingly. 

Now is the Worst Time to Waste Your Marketing Budget 

Just about every business sector has been negatively affected by COVID-19, either directly or indirectly. According to research from McKinsey & Company, it could take more than five years for the most severely affected sectors to return to 2019-level contributions to GDP: 

Regardless of whether your industry is set to recover, it could take a long time to reach pre-pandemic levels. Business leaders need to operate frugally while still moving forward with their sales and marketing initiatives. 

The best way to do this is by ensuring every marketing dollar counts. The more you check your metrics, the more informed optimizations you can make to your campaigns, ensuring your budget is always spent as effectively as possible. 

Adapt Your Marketing to the Realities of Today’s World 

Just about every day, we are seeing new restrictions, shutdowns, and major events happening around the world in real-time. Many of these events can significantly impact your business and marketing efforts. 

For example, many cities in the US and around the world are quickly imposing local lockdowns that include closing select businesses and limiting the opening hours of others. But you don’t want to leave your Google Ads running until 10pm each day when your business is suddenly forced to shut down at 5pm.

It also makes a lot of sense to segment your audiences based on their location and local sentiment. People in certain areas are more inclined to shop in-store or online, and the only way you can figure this out—and take advantage of it—is by paying close attention to how they engage with your marketing message.

There Are Opportunities to Take Advantage Of 

Throughout the last few months, certain channels have become significantly more (or less) popular with marketers compared to pre-pandemic times, and this means there are numerous opportunities you can take advantage of. Advertising is a prime example: a recent global advertising investment forecast from WARC shows that 2020 ad spend is expected to decline by 8.1%, rather than growing 7.1% year-over-year as expected.

Since businesses are investing less in advertising, competition for ad rank and cost-per-click is decreasing. If you optimize your advertising strategy right now, you can potentially rank well for keywords that were once too expensive to target. That said, diving into this new territory is only going to be effective if you prioritize regularly measuring performance.

In short, there’s no need to be in survival mode. Research from Rakuten recently showed that 87% of global consumers still plan to shop for Christmas and other seasonal holidays. What’s more, 57% expect to buy on key days like Black Friday. Imagine competing for ad space on Cyber Monday with half of your competition out of the advertising game. Businesses that are brave enough to take an aggressive marketing approach right now can set themselves up for significant success. 

Be Vigilant for the Time Being 

These are not normal times, which means businesses cannot rely upon a normal marketing strategy. If there was ever a time to start checking your marketing performance metrics several times per week, it’s now. Society, sentiment, marketing platforms, and business strategies are changing faster than ever before. If you don’t prioritize monitoring marketing ROI, don’t be surprised if your performance changes significantly each time you check-in.

The good news is you won’t have to be vigilant forever. Slowly, the world will go back to normal, and it will eventually become easier to predict the marketing landscape. Just keep monitoring performance closely. Once things level out with your metrics, you can start relying more on past performance again. 

Paying close attention to marketing ROI may well be a chore, but it does come with many added benefits. Businesses that manage to market effectively through 2020 will have built a strategy that’s much more in-tune with consumer preferences in the long run.

According to a study by New Vantage, 97.2% of organizations are investing in big data practices today. Just how valuable the intelligence you collect is, though, depends entirely on how capable you are of harnessing it. The first thing you need to do is consolidate your data effectively so you can easily process, analyze, and extract insights from the swathes of information.

Data consolidation can be challenging, time-consuming work. However, it’s easy to streamline your efforts by adhering to some key best practices. We delve into them below.

The Benefits of Data Consolidation

First, a quick summary of why data consolidation is critical in the modern marketing ecosystem. Combining your CRM, email, advertising, web performance, and other relevant intelligence in one place empowers you to do all of the following:

• Track audience activities across disparate platforms 
• Create better buyer personas and improve targeting 
• Attribute value to different marketing channels 
• Understand the relationship between business and cost data 
• Draw connections between online and offline conversion data 
• Enrich business reports 
• Improve data quality
• Identify other marketing opportunities you can take advantage of 

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Data insights can help you improve sales, marketing, customer success, and many other areas within your organization. Consolidating your data will ultimately enable you to maximize the value of investing in big data and artificial intelligence in the long term. 

Data Consolidation Best Practices to Follow

1. Look for ways to combine APIs

Effective data consolidation involves creating a system where your business data is regularly processed and uploaded to a single platform. You can manually consolidate data from various sources, but it will quickly become outdated and irrelevant as new, real-time business data comes in. Combining application programming interfaces (APIs) from your various data sources is the solution to this problem. 

The most valuable marketing technologies today have features in place that allow them to easily communicate and share data between other software programs. You need to have flexibility and control over how your different tools share data, what format the data is in, etc. If you’re unable to combine APIs between your various tools, it’s worthwhile investing in new technologies that can. 

2. Minimize reliance on walled gardens 

Successful data consolidation means you must have complete control over your own audience data. This becomes challenging when you rely heavily on “walled garden” data environments. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have a wealth of third-party data you can use to surface insights about your marketing campaigns. However, you don’t actually own this data, so you can’t control it or consolidate it. 

While you can’t simply cease using Facebook and Google Ads, there are tactics you can adopt to minimize your reliance on such walled garden data environments. For instance, avoid using features that also allow these platforms to control your first-party data (such as Facebook’s tracking pixel or Google’s tracking tags). Instead, use your own technologies to capture your intelligence. This will make it easier to control, unify, and analyze your audience data the way you want to. 

3. Ensure data completeness 

Utilizing technologies that can share and merge data is very valuable, but it’s easy to run into issues if the data you’re transferring is incomplete. Different tools use data points in different ways to categorize, tag, and sort consumer data. If you don’t have complete information about each of your leads or customers, this could lead to organizational issues later on.

As an example, some CRM platforms identify leads by their name, while others identify and categorize leads by their email address. If the data you transfer over is missing email addresses, then the tool will be unable to distinguish and categorize those leads properly. For this reason, ensure that all your fields are filled out before engaging in any kind of data consolidation activities.

4. Ensure consistency in data types 

It’s also vitally important that data types are consistent across these platforms. Different platforms will categorize and illustrate the same data contrastingly. You don’t want to discover this after your data is already merged. One tool may use a date/time format while another uses date only. Or one may denote currencies using symbols ($, €) while another uses USD and EUR abbreviations. It’s much easier to adapt your data to a new system before transferring it over, rather than fixing it after the fact. 

5. Use Unicode for data sets

As a result of globalization and the growth of the technology industry around the world, there are now a plethora of tools on the market that allow you to store single-byte characters (used for European languages) and double-byte characters (used for languages like Chinese and Japanese). However, if you merge your data to a platform that doesn’t have this flexibility, you could end up storing data with incongruent characters, making some fields impossible to read. 

Regardless of whether or not you run an international business that uses multiple languages, it’s just good practice to use a character set that can express data in any language. Unicode is one popular option that can encode and represent text irrespective of the character set used. 

6. Start with the most valuable data 

Data consolidation can be a huge task, particularly for enterprise-level businesses with various distinct audiences, marketing channels, and campaigns. Since it will take a while to achieve full data consolidation, it’s best to start with the data sets that you can derive the most valuable insights from.

Cross-channel data is one of the best places to start. Consistently marketing to leads across platforms is now more important than ever. It can grow your purchase rate, conversion rate, and ROI. According to Omnisend’s 2020 Marketing Automation Statistics Report, Omnichannel campaigns that include SMS are 47.7% more likely to lead to conversions: 

That said, omnichannel marketing is only possible if you’re able to track interactions across marketing channels. That’s a key benefit of data consolidation. So, start by integrating disparate data that will offer the most valuable insights into your marketing strategy, such as online and offline performance data and cross-channel interactions. 

7. Ensure data accuracy

Even if you’re able to combine APIs to automatically share data between platforms, there’s still a lot of possibility for errors in your data. The worst way to discover data errors is after you’ve already consolidated it in a single processing platform. Then you have to fix the problems on multiple platforms rather than one. The majority of data management systems have safeguards in place to prevent people from accidentally corrupting or deleting data. However, mistakes can still be made. It’s best to review your data at the source before consolidating it. 

Using the right data management tools, you can also use automation to double-check for data errors. Many automated bidding technologies have anomaly detection capabilities that can identify potential data errors, flag them, and notify marketing managers. In the case of PPC bidding, artificial intelligence can identify when campaign performance varies significantly from projections, then pause campaigns and give marketers the chance to determine if data anomalies are the cause. 

8. Invest in tools designed for data consolidation

Technologies that can help you streamline data consolidation are growing in number. Turning to technology for help is necessary for just about any sized business because there’s simply too much relevant business data to sift through by hand. 

What kind of tool you should invest in, though, depends on what your goals are. Why is data consolidation important to you? Most businesses invest in data consolidation to gain insights to empower sales and marketing organizations. In that case, it makes sense to consolidate data using a tool that can also help you analyze it and act on new insights. 

Data Consolidation - The Bottom Line 

There are plenty of benefits to data consolidation, but there is also a lot of room for error. You need to take a careful, planned approach to consolidate your data accurately, minimize the time you invest, and maximize the value for your marketing and sales strategy. Ultimately, the effectiveness of your data consolidation efforts owes a lot to your MarTech stack. You should work with technologies that can share data with each other and look to employ a central tool that can process all your relevant data for you. Invest in technology that’s designed for data consolidation and you can’t go wrong.

Sources:
https://content-na1.emarketer.com/digital-audio-advertising

While most consumers are familiar with ads that promote the sale of products and services, many are less familiar with cause-based campaigns—campaigns that the market the missions and movements of cause-based organizations.

For some perspective on this topic, we speak to Jordan Ruden, Co-Founder of cause-driven ad agency Craft and Commerce, and Amanda Pyron, Executive Director of The Network, a membership organization that advocates against domestic violence.

Amanda shares her inside perspective on the unique challenges that non-profits face, while Jordan provides color on how organizations can approach mission-driven advertising in today’s world.

Ah, Election Day. An opportunity to participate in democracy, make your voice heard, and post that “I VOTED” sticker all over the 'gram.

In previous years, voter turnout in the United States has been less than stellar. In the 2016 general election, just under 56% of the voting age population showed up at the polls. Compare that to the other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where the U.S. ranks 26 out of 32.

Political scientists and survey researchers cite different reasons for low turnout relative to other democratic countries—dissatisfaction with candidates, political apathy, or not having the time to get to one’s polling location due to work or school commitments.

While there are many hurdles to voting, Centro aims to alleviate the major deciding factor of choosing between one’s commitment to their work, and their commitment to casting a ballot. Election day occurs on a weekday, and the process of voting in-person often takes hours. That’s where Time to Vote comes in.

What is Time to Vote?

Centro is proud to stand alongside a diverse coalition of 400+ companies that are committed to ensuring their employees have a work schedule that allows them adequate time to vote in the upcoming presidential elections.

The Time to Vote coalition is a nonpartisan movement led by the business community to contribute to the culture shift needed to increase voter participation in our country's elections. By offering our Centrons in the U.S. and Canada a paid half day off for Election Day, Centro is committing to making accommodations for workers that help enable them to vote.

Time to Vote is nonpartisan and there is no cost for companies to join. Nearly 400 companies with employees in every state in the U.S. have signed up. Members include Best Buy, Farmers Insurance, Gap Inc., Glossier Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Levi Strauss & Co., Lyft, PayPal, Target, VF Corporation, Walmart, Warby Parker and more.

Why is Time to Vote important?

Time to Vote was started during the election season of 2018, in which fifty-three percent of the citizen voting-age population voted, making for the highest midterm turnout in four decades.

In comparison, the 2014 election had the lowest—only 21% of millennials voted, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. When 80% of young voters choose not to participate in the election process, business leaders should take more steps to encourage full participation by employees in exercising their right to vote.

I, myself, am among some of the eldest members of the generation that follows Millennials, Generation Z. As myself and my peers mature and enter the workforce, our values and goals are likely to change the way people approach work.

As a potential employee prospecting a company to work for, involvement in a coalition like Time to Vote is attractive because it tells me that this business truly cares about both its employees lives outside of work as well as the community and world in which it conducts business.

Centro’s membership in this organization aligns with our Guiding Principles, including Self Improvement and Believe Impact is Possible. In participating in Time to Vote’s initiatives, Centro is committed to continuous investment in the growth of our team members while, at the same time, requiring each person to actively take responsibility for their own self-development and well-being.

Where can I learn more?

To learn more about Time to Vote, head to their website.

Want to learn about Centro’s other employee benefits and perks? Check them out here.

Sources
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/21/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/dislike-of-candidates-or-campaign-issues-was-most-common-reason-for-not-voting-in-2016/
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/behind-2018-united-states-midterm-election-turnout.html
http://www.civicyouth.org/21-3-youth-turnout-preliminary-estimate-comparable-to-recent-midterm-years/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2019/09/10/how-generation-z-will-revolutionize-the-workplace/#5b574bb04f53

Meet the latest innovation in adtech: Basis Assistant, which was built for remote work.

Whether it’s running a programmatic campaign in the open exchange, buying impressions in a social media platform, or creating a report in a dashboarding tool—users can input notes from all of these sources in Basis Assistant, all without switching programs. This one-of-a-kind browser extension is compatible with any digital marketing platform.

On this webinar, Shawn Riegsecker, Founder and CEO of Basis Technologies, and Nick Saggese, Lead Product Manager for Basis Assistant, dive into the ins and outs of Basis Assistant, what it does, and how it's built for you.

Complete a purchase. Install an app. Sign up for an event.

Every campaign has a goal. And behind every campaign, there's a media buyer working diligently to ensure that goal is met.

Day after day, these superhumans evaluate campaign performance and make real-time optimizations to improve results. But when you're managing 20, 60, or 80 campaigns, it’s incredibly hard to keep track of all the changes made in a day.

Until now, optimization logs were the best solution the advertising industry could come up with to tackle this problem. These logs often show up as shared Google Sheets into which buyers input the date, time, author, platform, campaign, and other details about each optimization they make.  

The flaw is that maintaining well-organized logs that include all those important details isn’t a clean process. Each time buyers log information outside the system they're working in, they must exit the task in order to add a note to their optimization log.

The process is disruptive, cumbersome, and time-consuming, which discourages buyers from tracking optimizations.  

Centro created a browser extension compatible with any digital marketing platform. Basis Assistant is a one-of-a-kind tool that aims to help marketers grow their business by simplifying logging processes and facilitating knowledge sharing among teams.

Whether they're running a programmatic campaign in the open exchange, buying impressions in a social media platform, or creating a report in a dashboarding tool, users can input notes from all these sources in Basis Assistant without switching programs. 

Basis Assistant provides members with access to contextually relevant information that explains why, when, where, and how a change was made. This equips members with the knowledge they need to carry out their activities without having to schedule another meeting, send an email, or coordinate a video chat to discuss a campaign’s status. 

In an industry that's based on collaboration, ensuring that teammates have access to detailed information about the status of campaigns is fundamental to success. Internal communication shouldn’t involve filling 5, 7, or 12 rows in a spreadsheet so that you and your peers can know a creative was swapped, a bid was increased, or a targeting parameter was removed to boost performance.  

Optimization logs aren’t just notepads. They contain a wealth of knowledge that can and should be used by teams to expedite communication, learn from each other’s ideas, and revisit the past in order to make better decisions in the future.  

Built for remote work. Built for collaboration. Built for cross-channel media management.  

Basis Assistant was built for you.  

Download the extension today.  

As the usage rate of mobile devices climbs annually, marketers may be wondering how they can best leverage mobile apps to boost their user acquisition via mobile advertising. While evaluating which channels will best capture an intended audience, I urge you to consider mobile gaming apps for your next mobile advertising campaign!

Why Advertise on Mobile Gaming Apps?

Advertisers looking to cater their mobile advertising to a large target audience will find that mobile gaming apps have a very wide reach. Globally, the number of downloads of gaming apps lead in the app download category, well ahead of downloads of social networking, tools, and photo and video apps.

The diversity of mobile games available to download, such as puzzles, shooter, and/or action games, contributes to a diverse audience of mobile gamers. Research from Jun Group found that the majority of U.S. mobile gamers identify as women, and 45% of U.S. mobile gamers are 18-34 years old. Advertisers should consider their target demographic when selecting a mobile game app type to target ads. The same study found that female gamers prefer puzzle/strategy games, while male gamers prefer sports/racing and adventure/story games.

How to Advertise on Mobile Gaming Apps

Advertisers looking to promote their own mobile gaming app would do well to consider mobile advertising on other similar mobile gaming apps, as users who enjoy one type of mobile gaming app are more likely to install another similar game type. Some networks can leverage behavioral data in their targeting that will allow advertisers to target ads based on mobile device ID, operating system, or device type, but reliable, cost-effective third-party data tools are still in development, as of October 2019.

While mobile gaming apps are generally brand-safe due to the lack of user-generated content, rising ad fraud rates still plague the platform. In a July 2019 study by Appsflyer, most gaming apps measured below-average mobile app install fraud rates, relative to other categories like finance, social, and shopping. As new ad formats, networks, and exchanges are introduced, though, fraud rates will continue to rise.

Displaying mobile advertising on mobile game apps presents new challenges and ad formats for advertisers to try. Because mobile ads can disrupt gameplay and affect gamer satisfaction with the app, there are also unique challenges posed for gaming app developers who include ads in their product. Most global game developers offer a mix of rewarded video, interstitial, and banner ads in their mobile gaming apps.

The majority of U.S. millennials and high-income gamers prefer opt-in rewarded mobile ads, which are ads that can be launched within a game, in exchange for a benefit to the gamer, like a bonus life for example. While this format comes with a higher eCPM, it also delivers results. Video completion and install rates of rewarded video ads are high and the advertiser only pays if the viewer completes the action.

Advertisers looking for an engaging mobile advertising opportunity should also consider a playable ad, which is essentially an interactive, miniature version of the advertised game, or a branded mini-game.

Mobile gaming apps have enjoyed rapid growth in mobile advertising, due to their high number of downloads, wide audience reach, and contextual targeting capabilities. For gaming app publishers and advertisers—advertising on mobile gaming apps is a win-win!

Learn more about Mobile Advertising with Centro.

Source:
Wurmser, Yoram. “Mobile In-Game Advertising.” EMarketer, 17 Oct. 2019, emarketer.com/content/mobile-in-game-advertising.