In recent decades, the marketing industry has increasingly focused its strategies on measuring - and ultimately improving - the return on investment from their ad spending. Many brands went about this mission primarily by optimizing for clicks, likes and views on digital platforms. But more recently, forward-thinking brands are moving away from a narrow clicks- and views-focused era of performance metrics towards direct measurement of the impact that the advertising creative has on consumer preferences and brand equities.
Today, an increasing number of top marketing executives are embracing a far more potent methodology for gauging the impact of advertising campaign content. We’re entering a new era where leaders across the industry are breaking with out-of-date tactics and seizing the opportunity to measure and optimize their advertising’s persuasive impact – before launching new campaigns.
Focusing on accountability is a good thing for any business - who doesn't want to invest their budgets more effectively, especially in a business where ‘upper funnel’ metrics carry a reputation for being rather ‘squishy’?
Unfortunately, with the rise of the major digital ad platforms starting 15–20 years ago, many marketers were taught to focus their efforts (and spend) on tactics that moved the most easily measurable metrics, such as engagement, views, directly attributable leads and conversions, to give them ROI statistics that looked good and that they could make incremental improvements to. Many CMOs were uncomfortable with this since their thinking more often focuses on the big story of their brands rather than micro-optimizations of ad executions. These leaders recognized that they're in the business of persuasion - moving consumers' hearts and minds, central to which is the storytelling and brand-building that shapes perceptions and engenders loyalty, all of which directly support the growth of any product or service. However, most ultimately found a place for these metrics in their marketing organization, and in many cases, over time, these metrics came to define performance.
That is now changing rapidly, propelled by better technological solutions to measuring the impact of the creative. Many brands of all sizes are taking an entirely new approach to measuring the impact of brand creative, and realizing that this impact can be predicted. It can be refined. It can be optimized. Whether discussing TV commercials, social media ads, or out-of-home, brand advertising delivers tangible results that move people and businesses. And now that impact can be measured.
The marketers who are taking advantage of this insight have stopped wasting money on ads that don’t work and are actually wielding advertising that drives brand lift and, ultimately, more revenue.
To fully capture the power of brand lift, marketers must go beyond the limitations of traditional measures. While it’s true that classic lift studies can gauge purchase consideration and intent, marketers today need more depth – and far more speed.
For instance, many marketing execs require the ability to uncover the brand lift attributes and beliefs that consumers associate with a brand – whether it's luxury, speed, or safety for a car brand or health, taste, or energy for a food product – that lead to an increase in purchase behavior. They need insights into the overall positive sentiment toward their products and company based on its stories, associations, and perceptions. And they need to be able to obtain this information in an actionable, timely fashion. This means tomorrow, not next month.
If that can be achieved, marketers can meld insight-driven decisions with traditional performance tactics to build a sustainable brand that drives bottom-line results. Our work with CMOs across all market sectors lets us see how scientifically driven brand lift data has a powerful impact on consumer mindsets and sales growth.
The deployment of next-generation, cloud-based rapid brand lift measurement is turning the tide and providing actionable insights for marketers before they deploy media dollars, typically their largest expense. This technology empowers us to identify the drivers behind brand perceptions and the ideas that fall short in our creative. That’s welcome news for marketers under pressure to quantify the increase they can generate in return on ad spend. The strongest brand lift data can reveal where a brand can go next, arming marketers with the ammunition to secure increased marketing budgets.
Let's look at how an iconic CPG brand used pre-testing to guide its decision-making. The CPG brands’ marketing team was unsure which messaging would boost sales and loyalty among younger audiences they were looking to attract, so they tested three different messages with different brand voices, ranging from more traditional to edgy to optimistic.
The marketing team turned to a new approach involving randomized control trials (RCTs), a technique borrowed from scientific research. In an RCT, one group of consumers is exposed to an ad (the treatment group), while another similar group is not (the control group) to measure the creative's impact on brand lift. Marketers can pinpoint the ad's persuasive power by observing significant differences in attitudes towards the brand between the groups after the ad exposure.
RCTs help marketers prove causal relationships, not just correlations. In an era where consumers have supercomputers in their pockets and tech platforms have access to computing power that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, the ability to run creative experiments that collect and process real-time brand metrics data has increased dramatically.
Swayable's experiment platform conducts large-scale survey experiments for marketers, taking advantage of cloud computing and patented machine learning to get results to marketers within 24 hours: at least thirty times faster than was possible before. This allows for agile decision-making and dramatic improvement of marketing efforts.
In our CPG example, the brand team's access to rapid-fire brand lift insights showed that its traditional messaging led to greater engagement and purchase intent among its youth target – providing the company the confidence it needed to move forward with ads in its authentic voice.
The result was a 7% increase in sales lift within selected markets - a notable jump in business for a 100-year-old plus brand.
Increasingly, leading marketers are changing their approach to quantifying the value of advertising – radically. They’ve learned that true data science has finally come to brand favorability research – allowing this practice to exist on the same playing field as clicks, shares, conversions, etc.
We’re headed to a place where quantifying the impact of advertising - the all-important ‘did it work’ question – is becoming more accurate and predictable. It turns out that, yes, persuasion can be measured. Upper and mid-funnel metrics like brand lift can be calculated with precision and provide brands with segment-level insights into what messages will move consumers toward purchase.
The fact is brand advertising can and should be evaluated using a whole new set of methodologies and metrics. This emerging paradigm has the potential to reshape everything from ad output and media allocation to the entire marketing practice. This is not about testing a few creative variations – this is about rethinking a marketer's entire way of operating, making sophisticated pre-testing for brand lift a core strategy for how they go to market. And it’s making paying for ads that don’t work a thing of the past.
Great marketing aims to change minds and the way to prove it’s working is by measuring brand lift. Accessing the power of real-time measurement of what persuades is fundamentally changing the impact advertising can have on customers and, ultimately, the bottom line.
When you use Swayable, you'll never have to gamble on the impact your content will have on target audiences. Stop going into your campaign development process blind and harness the power of brand insights before you take it live.
Interested in a live demonstration? Contact shane@swayable.com or book a demo to see how Swayable can improve your brand's campaign development process. Implementation can be done in just a few days.