The past year has been momentous for marketers. Although the pandemic is still looming heavily over our lives, the year has taught us many lessons about doing business in a crisis.
In this new era of adaptability and change, marketers must quickly find the right balance to drawing and retaining the consumer’s attention, while maintaining lean and cost-effective marketing strategies to maximise ROI.
Measurement, however, remains a major challenge for businesses everywhere. A recent study by Nielsen suggests that “marketers across budget sizes and industries reported low confidence in their marketing technology solutions. FMCG and CPG companies, as well as small-budget marketers, were the least confident”.
How marketers spend their money to achieve their marketing objectives differs across budget sizes.
There are numerous marketing tools and technologies which can be leveraged today to provide valuable insights that can help them to make real-time decisions. As companies continue to invest in leaner marketing technology solutions, those with medium and small budgets can create a level playing field by investing in marketing technology.
Companies with small budgets need to effectively manage their finances and ensure customer retention, for this, such companies should leverage MarTech solutions to optimise spending. It is also better for companies with small budgets to spend on marketing channels that have given proven results.
According to the Nielsen report, although customer acquisition and brand awareness are important to all companies, small- to medium-sized brands are 22% more likely to prioritise this objective as more important and when compared with large brands, they are six times more likely to invest in personalization and three times more in path-to-purchase sequencing.
To maximise ROI, companies with mid-sized budgets should focus on customer retention and evaluate new trends to find emergent customer segments. Companies with mid-sized marketing budgets should also invest in cross-channel measurement resources.
In the post-pandemic era, large budget companies should focus on keeping brand awareness and recall high. They need to optimise spending rather than cut down on it, and spending should be optimised through channels that have contributed most to their successful business outcomes.
Nevertheless, as the economy recovers and opens up in the post-pandemic world, it is important for marketers to remain agile and future-proof themselves. It was seen that during the pandemic, brands with bigger budgets that invested greatly in marketing technology and agile marketing principles had a stronger advantage because they were better able to react and adapt to the ever-changing environment in terms of their marketing mix.
In the future, marketers are expected to face challenges such as identity resolution and cross-channel measurement. Without cookies, marketers will increasingly need to rely on first-party data, and brands with all budget sizes will need to invest in the right tools to help them allocate their budget and better measure their full-funnel media ROI.