Market in time
Knowing how and where to spend your marketing dollars can often feel like a guessing game. This is, in part, due to the old approach of relying on your gut and outdated, standalone reports to make multimillion-dollar investment decisions, which, in turn, make forecasting future opportunities a challenge.
Marketing plans typically happen as part of annual budgeting and are based on two key variables: investment level (how much you spend) and channels (where you spend it). But only looking only at dollars and tactics gives a flat, two-dimensional view at best–there’s no depth or ability to understand the ebb and flow of effectiveness, and no way to measure relative impact and importance.
As a result, marketers often overspend in certain seasons when those incremental dollars won’t generate incremental sales and underspend when those dollars could be more productive. With the proliferation and fragmentation of marketing channels, making decisions by gut or in reference to historical data is insufficient to optimize value creation and mitigate risks.
Act sooner, smarter, and faster
Traditionally, marketers looked at plans in annual time units and measured them accordingly. That means a year of marketing spend is sunk before you get a read on how that investment is performing, with the potential for a lot of what-if scenarios to occur in those 12 months. But advances in machine-learning and AI technology have made it possible—and advisable—for marketers to introduce a third dimension into their marketing mix planning—timing.
An inherent benefit of technology is its ability to speed things up and automate the process of doing more math and breaking analyses down into smaller units. Adding the power of algorithms makes it feasible to calculate the impact of each channel for each week of the plan and project contribution over the long-term, typically six years into the future, so marketers can look at their investments with an unprecedented level of comparability and clarity.
This kind of platform gives you the ability to optimize your marketing mix across all channels and weeks to maximize the value generated from the dollars you spend, minimize the risk of veering off course, and follow the response curve for each tactic to the point of diminishing return.
Prove maximum value, minimal risk
For too long, marketers have suffered from vanity metrics that tell a lovely story about the tactic but don’t reflect the impact on value creation. This has created a costly gap between marketing and the rest of the C-suite, with CMOs spending the least amount of time in their roles at just 40 months on average, according to the latest Spencer Stuart study.
Marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution measure past performance, which helps brand managers justify what they did, but offers little direction for the future. However, as martech performance-management technologies evolve, they are closing the gap, equipping marketers to toss aside vanity in favor of accurate forecasts of potential financial contribution and prescriptive guidance for how to deliver.
Now, marketing, finance, sales and agency partners can share one clear view of the marketing plan and anticipated revenue and/or profitability with the ability to compare actuals to forecast, resulting in an increase of cross-functional collaboration, coordination, and confidence.
Stop wasting time
Knowing when to activate your marketing plan is as important as getting the channel mix itself right. That’s why it’s essential to learn and prepare for the opportunities–and pitfalls–2023 might bring with it, including inflation, Covid variants, increases in online buying, and a likely recession. Ultimately, our technology can get you there faster and smarter, allowing you to deliver more sales with greater continuity and higher profitability.
Keen to know more? Read our guide for a deeper understanding of the importance of time in your go-to market strategy and see real-life examples of brands we have partnered with to optimize spend and increase ROI with our future-focused modeling.
Because time is money, and you can’t afford to wait.
