With the shifts in consumer behavior and marketing strategy necessitated by 2020 potentially becoming normalized and many unknowns for 2021 on the horizon, business leaders are faced with big questions about where and how to focus their time – and budgets. The question is: what has the biggest impact and how can decisions drive results now while also planting the seeds for future growth?
At Analytic Partners client-only event, NorthStar Connect, world-renowned marketing expert and virtual professor Mark Ritson shared his thoughts on those questions and more in the aptly titled “Ritson’s Smorgasbord.” Ritson shared a series of insights into what he suggests are the seven core priorities all marketers should keep in mind over the next 12 months. You can access the full video of his presentation here.
While each of the seven items is relevant and critical to marketing leaders, our clients also let their voice be heard by voting for what they thought is the most important. Let’s take a closer look at number one: Balancing long and short-term trajectories for sustained success
Balancing long and short-term trajectories for sustained success
As Mark Ritson suggests, the theory of long and short is one of the most important for all marketing leaders right now. The “short” in this scenario is performance marketing, which produces an immediate impact caused by a specific investment. The “long” is brand building, which tends to be slower moving but is key for solid gradual growth.
The critical issue most leaders face in balancing out the long and the short is that while it is broadly recognized that both are necessary, and a healthy mix has been proven to make brands more money, budgets rarely reflect that truth. So, why is this? And more importantly, how can business leaders overcome this challenge to better plan for success in both the short term and the long term?
The “why” will come as no surprise. Marketers most frequently work not in multi-year planning cycles, but in yearly or even quarterly planning cycles. Thus, the relatively higher value of brand building overtime is often missed in favor of a focus on the shorter-term performance marketing benefits. In order to overcome this challenge, business leaders need to take a broader approach to measurement that allows them to optimize spend based on not only what is working in the short term, but also what is likely to pay off in the long term.
At Analytic Partners, we achieve this through our commercial mix analytics. Commercial Mix Analytics is a unified measurement system that with Commercial Mix Modeling at its center, incorporates brand, customer, operational and touchpoint analytics to provide strategic and tactical results with both granular customer and full business views. It is a holistic and multi-dimensional framework designed to overcome the limits of other solutions, which can leave marketers acting on incomplete information and potentially false assumptions.
With CMM as a foundation, additional analytic layers – including branding and long-term analytics enable marketers to escape the risks of an imbalanced strategy that favors only short-term gain, or holds out unnecessarily counting on long-term wins without proof of efficacy. By incorporating the indirect impacts that marketing has on brand KPIs such as brand health, imagery and preference, longer term impacts can be quantified and leveraged for forward looking planning.
This approach is powered by our proprietary platform, GPS Enterprise, that allows marketers to balance multiple KPIs and goals. GPS Enterprise incorporates quantified short and longer term impacts within our optimization and decisioning tools so marketers can better understand the tradeoffs between short term gains and long term opportunity costs.
This powerful multi-objective structure can uncover opportunities for growth while incorporating real-world and strategic business constraints. The actionability of this approach makes it possible to plan confidently for both short and long-term success and ultimately deliver stronger business impact.
Take a bite out of Mark Ritson’s Smorgasbord
While we have taken a closer look at one of the most high-priority insights covered in Mark Ritson’s smorgasbord, there are still six more to go. From mastering two-speed targeting to optimizing creative and beyond, you can access the full video presentation here to hear more from Mark. And if you want to learn more about how Analytic Partners can help you not only tackle the short and the long, but all of the seven topics listed, please contact us.
