I’ve built my career on strong customer relationships. Part of this is because I love people. I want to know about our customers’ successes, their strategies, and the personal milestones they accomplish along the way. But, more importantly, keeping an open line of communication means our team can focus on the insights and product features that matter most to our customers. 

While having those conversations, one truth became clear to me: real world behavior is the foundation for the real business results advertisers need, like in-store visits and increased ROAS. While the tools and channels continue to evolve in the digital landscape, real world behavior still remains the most important driver for success. 

Let’s talk about why. 

Demands on Marketers Continue to Increase while Precision Decreases for Digital Audience Segments

The appeal of digital advertising was in how easy it is to reach the right audiences at scale, and the ease with which performance can be measured. Up until now, it’s been faster to report how many people visited your website from a mobile ad than those who visited after seeing a billboard on their way to work, a television ad, or any other traditional advertising. 

And because clear attribution matters to everyone from CFOs to board members to marketers themselves, focus has been on digital metrics—especially when advertising is more expensive than ever. But in that time, audience segmentation based on digital behavior is getting less and less precise. As a result, it costs advertisers more to get the same results they used to get. Not ideal. 

I can hear the stress in conversations I have with colleagues and customers old and new. Marketers want to know where to invest their budget to reach their goals. They don’t have time to waste guessing on audience segments or mediums without measurement. They need proven targeting and real, verifiable business results. 

And my answer is always the same: don’t focus on what’s easiest to measure. Follow where the biggest return is: inside your locations, where the majority of transactions still happen.

Real World Behavior Proves Instrumental for Long Term Success

Digital behavior may be easier to measure, but it is not the most valuable behavior to understand. In-store visits are still the most important in terms of purchases and lifetime customer value. And still, companies largely leave it out of the media plans. 

At GroundTruth, we make it impossible to overlook. Our only goal is to make our customers successful in tangible, meaningful ways—in other words, success reflected in your bottom line. Our platform builds audiences based on their habits and real world behaviors, and reaches them at the exact moment they are ready to make a decision. We don’t rely solely on predictions and estimated digital browsing history. We focus on what’s real. Because that’s what our customers are measured on. 

So far, focusing on real world behavior is the only way we know to not only withstand the changes in our industry, but grow through them. It’s why I’m such a big advocate for connected TV, and why we continue to evolve our platform to fit the new ways people live and shop. Because trends and predictions are valuable. But nothing matters more than what people do out in the real world.

The post The Real Business Results You Need Are Driven by the Real-World Behaviors You’re Ignoring appeared first on GroundTruth.

The change keeps my job exciting. It also forces a lot of conversations, both with my own teams, and with our customers, about what trends matter. Everyone wants to put their ads where their customers are, but no one wants to waste money on impressions that don’t lead to real business results (in GroundTruth speak, that’s RBRs). 

Knowing what trends to follow and which to ignore is more of an art than a science, but I’ve come up with a few personal philosophies to help our partners balance the need to build an omnichannel marketing strategy while keeping a healthy Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Here’s what I tell our customers. 

Some Marketing Trends Become the Standard

Change happens faster every year. It’s easy to become skeptical that everything is worth paying attention to. And most of it won’t be. But successful marketers don’t wait until something becomes standard to create a plan. You have to be proactive to get that competitive ad spend. And you need to understand what audiences respond to in order to reach your target ROAS quickly. 

Connected TV, for example, is still in its early stages. But, GroundTruth customers are already leveraging the power of streaming to reach audiences and break records for their campaigns. Teams aren’t throwing their whole budget, or even huge budgets, at new channels, but they are creating room to experiment and evolve with their customers. And because they’re trying new ideas sooner, they have a competitive advantage. 

ROAS should help you improve your strategies

One advantage of trying new things is improving ROAS across all campaigns as teams learn what works and for which audiences. One of the advantages of ROAS as a key metric for your advertising performance is its versatility. You can calculate ROAS for different geographic regions, for customers and potential customers, for messaging. It’s a metric that tells you how effective your ads are and how much further you can push your team to reach the highest revenue possible. 

When you’re thinking about new marketing trends and technologies, use ROAS to help guide your experimentation. Look at the channels your teams are successfully using already, and consider whether you can push those ads to an even broader audience to get even more revenue. If your ROAS for audiences in a certain city is 5:1, what surrounding areas can you add to your targeting to push that to 6:1? Not only will your team make more profit, but more money gives your team freedom to try new things and learn even more about what works. 

It’s Better to Move Fast and Pivot

The most important thing to remember is marketing teams will always need to try new things. Waiting for a sure thing never helped anyone rise to the top. To succeed in 2024, you need to evaluate emerging technologies and trends and invest in what makes sense for your company. By jumping in early, pivoting quickly to what you learn, and updating your strategies, not only will you avoid ruining your ROAS, but you will likely improve it. 

If the question is, “Can you follow marketing trends without risking ROAS?”, the answer is—probably not. But, if the question is, “Can I make smart choices about emerging trends and still reach my revenue targets?”, then the answer is—you might have to. 

Key Takeaways: 

• 2024 is an expensive year that will require experimentation and thoughtful iteration from teams.
• ROAS is a flexible metric that can help teams get a high view of how efficiently they’re spending based on audiences, channels, and campaigns.
• Not all marketing trends that show up will stay, but successful marketers will invest in the ones that make sense, and learn something new each time.

The post Can Companies Follow Marketing Trends Without Ruining ROAS? appeared first on GroundTruth.