zChoosing the right approach is the final step your business needs to take for effective marketing in a privacy-first environment. Incremental approaches and planning help to create a solid foundation for your business. Moreover, picking the right pathway ensures you can continue to do great things. Defining the right approach involves five key steps.
Choosing the Right Approach: Identifying Goals
As always, deciding the best tools for your marketing toolbox should be intrinsically linked to your business goals. Whichever tools you select, you should always keep the end target in mind. In the first place, it’s important to consider your key performance indicators (KPIs) and how your marketing affects them.
You’ll also want to consider which channel is best for your budget allocation. If you have a small margin of error, it’s best to not experiment too much. By the same token, think about advertising on specific channels. What creative is most suitable? What optimisation is required? Finally, which audience is most pertinent as a target, and how will we define their demographics.
Considering Constraints
This second step for choosing the right approach is more relevant due to the limitations of privacy-first marketing. In light of browser cookie support changes, you must consider what data is readily available for your business. Likewise, is it aggregated, or individual data?
The best approach is weighing up the four favourables of a campaign. Firstly, what channel types are being measured? Do they create data limits for you? Secondly, comparability is paramount. Think about a clear benchmark to reach for your campaign to be successful. Next, evaluate speed. How fast do you need results? More optimised and targeted campaigns may take longer to yield quality performance compared to scattergun approaches. However, the former will vastly outweigh the value of the latter. By evaluating this, you can assess accuracy versus precision. This final point should join up all your thinking when selecting the right approach.
Choosing the Right Approach: Testing Approaches
In our previous blog, we stressed the importance of incrementality. In light of this, it comes as no surprise that choosing the right approach involves determining the incrementality of your campaigns! You should run your experiments using a control group against a test group and thoroughly evaluate the results.
As already explained, the most incremental solutions will give clear indications of business outcomes. Test non-incremental, uncalibrated, calibrated models, and random experiments too. Sales reporting numbers, statistical or data-driven attribution, or conversion lift information are the gold standard for successful incremental approaches.
At this point, you establish how quickly you can get results, and how precise they are.
Assessment and Adjustment:
Choosing the right approach doesn’t end with advertising. You need to evaluate, too. Businesses that assess incrementality find it easy to answer this question: are your marketing methods helping you reach your business goals?
If the answer is yes, great! Just work out how, and repeat this process. If the answer is no, it’s not the end of the world! Your team needs to focus on why not.
This evaluation can be completed through five questions to answer after every campaign:
- What was the biggest lesson and how do you clarify this insight?
- How do your results compare against your benchmark?
- What is the best creative, copy and optimisation when comparing performance?
- How can you implement this into future campaigns?
- Finally, how does this advertising influence future activities?
The Next Goal
Choosing the right approach is not one-size-fits-all. The best businesses will be prepared to do this entire process again! Each time, you’ll learn something new. Eventually, you will reach the ideal outcome. This is the pinnacle of good measurement – embracing a test and learn mindset.
The Final Word: Advertising in Privacy-First Worlds
Advertising is going to change dramatically in the privacy-first world. Cookies will disappear in their current form. Data masking will become more common. Therefore, it’s up to marketers and businesses to look at new methods to collect data. These include advanced APIs and aggregated data.
There are 3 core principles to privacy-first advertising. Planning for the short and long term is critical. Evaluating data granularity and investigating data pathways tells you what data you collect and where from. This will help with reviewing policy scopes.
In turn, these can help a business calculate incrementality. By validating their metrics, businesses learn what marketing is best for them.
Assessing performance will help you take the right approach. Firstly, identify your business goals. Then consider what constraints you might face. Scale and test approaches and don’t be afraid to try new ideas. Once you assess performance and make adjustments, it’s time to repeat the process again.
By utilising these lessons, your business can continue to thrive in a world that puts privacy first.
