Managing a marketing budget is a high-stakes game of chance. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of dollars in media budgets rest on a marketer’s tactical choices – decisions that are made by 75% of marketers today without any statistical support. How are these tactical decisions being made, then? The truth is, tactics are based primarily on what can be remembered by the marketer as “successful” from past campaigns, and then adjusted to respond to the changes perceived to have taken place in the marketing landscape since then. The fact of the matter is, digging up actionable insights from the data created by past campaigns is time consuming and, depending on how it was recorded, may require a graduate-level degree in statistics just to make some sense from it.
Let’s compare this undertaking with betting on a game of chance in a casino. Some gamble for entertainment, others take it more seriously. But either way, if you gamble without knowing the odds you’re most likely going to lose. Now, knowing the odds inside and out certainly doesn’t guarantee a win, but at least you can mitigate silly decisions by understanding the risks and relative rewards for each situation. A gambler might know what worked in the past, and might have a strategy for winning in the future based on that, but what happens if the house changes the odds? You have to adjust, or your odds of winning will go down and success will only be achieved through pure luck.
Luckily for gamblers, the odds and house rules of the classic gambling games don’t change that often. When they do, it’s usually minor adjustments to provide a further advantage to the house or stamp out a tactic that is being exploited by players. Imagine though, if the odds changed as often (and as significantly!) as digital marketing trends do. Not only that, but in this brave new world of marketing we find ourselves in, the rules aren’t clearly posted for all to see. The attitudes of online consumers change too quickly, before the ink used to print social media marketing textbooks can even dry!
So in a way, marketing without the ability make data-driven decisions is like gambling without knowing the odds; you’re taking shots in the dark, except the bets are made with client maketing budget (which for most people is a lot more than they would ever bring for a night out at the tables). Not only that, but the client is expecting a significant return on that investment… losing it on account of “bad luck” will not be an acceptable response at the end of a campaign. Qoints was developed to address the pain of making sense of digital marketing data; the goal is to make brand marketers smarter by informing their tactical decisions using the vast amounts of data that technology makes available to us.
Qoints is like the dealer that says “I suggest you hit, sir!”
CMOs and brand marketers who are actively tracking a standardized set of KPIs, analyzing their past campaign performance, and using deep analytics to plan future campaigns are like card counters. They know the odds of the game intimately. They’ve been paying attention to what’s happened in the past, and they are leveraging that information to better plan for and predict the future.
Using Qoints when you’re planning, executing, and evaluating your digital promotions is like having a heads-up display when you’re sitting at the poker table, showing you pot odds, how many outs you have, and suggestions for how to play your hand. Performance monitoring using data-driven intelligence allows a marketer to move budgets to more channels that are performing better, and industry benchmarks take the guesswork out of measuring success.
Are you ready to put your digital promotions to the test? Contact us at [email protected] to learn how we can help start making data-driven decisions and stop gambling with your marketing budgets.