Gaps in Results vs Spending : Tell tale patterns of botched Transformations

With the advent of COVID in 2020, pretty much all the avenues of direct consumer touchpoints in the physical world having been exhausted, there is huge push into the virtual world. Even otherwise Marketers worldwide has been trying digital marketing knowing that it is the future of their business and the COVID just catapulted those efforts !

So the common mantra is lets be ready for a Digital Transformation !

 As per the The CMO Survey, they’re happy to allocate 57% of their budgets to digital marketing activities and are planning to increase spending by another 16% in 2023.

So, where are they expecting to invest , any guess ?

Any guess why there is a focus on Analytics or Attribution of the spend. This is the symptom, that also points to the big opportunity in this space . There has been very little analysis available to clearly attribute sales performance to the spend due to multiple reasons. Also given that , in most cases or at least one third of the digital marketing activity especially the media buying are performed by external agencies , partners and others, these reports often are considered in isolation to the consolidated efforts from the organisation. Also, the budgets often are based on consumer awareness driven use cases than that of incremental revenue. Unless, it is a from an ecommerce channel, data in these reports often gets limited to the philosophical pageviews, CTR’s or awareness indexes which might also have been equally done from a TV ad or an ATL, BTL activity. Simply put , unless we had some mechanisms that were used by traditional set-top boxes, it becomes an elusive world of guesstimates when it comes to precisely understanding the ROI of the spend.

While marketing driven digital transformations have done well on integrating the digital marketing data with other intelligence they have about their customers in terms of Sales, what they have not been able to single out is to lay a data foundation for measuring impact of digital marketing across offline & online alike. I.e How are we able to answer a business head who needs a recommendation to part x% of the activity to BTL activity for instore execution and y% for the digital marketing for the same product activation. Unless we have advanced measurement techniques a.k.a tools and models for mix modelling, econometrics models and attribution the information from the digital marketing cannot be integrated effectively across sales marketing, customer service and product teams effectively to improve usage.

Often, its the lack of understanding of the full customer journey or connecting of the data across the full customer journey across offline and online channels are the root cause of the gaps between the spending allocation vs performance, as every other function tries to bluff the budget for the same impact and ends up duplication and at times losing the ability to convert or understand the persona better. This observation is also corroborated by the survey results findings which highlights needs to Alignment to Long term vision to Awareness and Integration of all touch points and the data connected to make sense of where the efforts are driving the impact.