MARKETING
The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business [+Data From 500 Marketers]
More companies than ever are using Instagram for business. Back in 2017, the social platform celebrated having over 25 million businesses. Today, we can bet that number has likely doubled.
Instagram has proven a worthwhile investment for marketing purposes. When we surveyed over 1,000 marketers in 2022, they revealed that Instagram is the most effective social media platform, above Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
But using Instagram for business purposes can seem daunting, particularly if you’ve only ever used it for personal use. Here, we’re going to explore how to promote your business on Instagram.
How to Use Instagram for Business
Let’s delve into the six strategies you’ll need to employ to get the most out of Instagram.
1. Add value with your content.
First and foremost, Instagram is a visual platform. To attract an audience, it’s critical you spend time delivering high-quality, thoughtful content.
To succeed on Instagram, it’s essential you create valuable content that attracts an audience and encourages them to engage with your business. Consider how you can delight your customers while staying true to your brand.
You don’t need to just post images of your product to spread brand awareness and increase sales. In fact, in some cases, it’s better if you don’t.
For instance, Hot Pockets sells microwaveable pocket sandwiches. Admittedly, I wasn’t much of a fan of Hot Pockets — until I began following their business’s Instagram account.
There are only so many times you can post a picture of a sandwich. Hot Pockets goes in a different direction. Instead, they appeal to their audience through humor, often posting relevant memes or funny quotes.
For instance, in response to @ShallowDivers’ claim that Hot Pockets aren’t sandwiches, Hot Pockets responded with this:
Ultimately, it might take trial and error to find the content that works best for your business.
While Hot Pockets relies on humor, other brands like The North Face use impressive adventure images to appeal to their demographic.
The point is, brands need to add value to Instagram’s community rather than using the platform for advertisements alone. This is critical for your long-term success.
Looking for a few more tips on how to use Instagram to positively impact your business? Check out these Instagram hacks in the video below.
Put these tips to work, and update your marketing mantra from “content is king” to “valuable content is king.”
2. Maintain a consistent theme.
Imagine each Instagram post as an individual page of your website.
While each post should be good on its own, ideally you’ll need to create a cohesive theme to maintain an audience’s loyalty.
It’s important to note, I mean “theme” in the broad sense, as it relates to everything from hashtags and captions to pictures and videos. You’ll need to create a consistent tone of voice and a unified feed aesthetic.
Ultimately, the more specific and consistent you are with your posts, the more likely you are to attract your most authentic audience.
You might think it’s better to appeal to more people through various themes, but ultimately, staking your claim in a specific niche will help you create stronger, more genuine connections.
For instance, consider MVMT. Their feed is undoubtedly consistent, with similar filters and color palette, and an emphasis on darker, edgier images:
Their consistency is equally obvious in their captions, with phrases like “Create a life you can’t wait to wake up to,” and “Unexplored paths lead to undiscovered stories.” In every post, you’ll see the same hashtag: #jointhemvmt.
Undoubtedly, their followers both expect and prefer this type of content, or they wouldn’t have followed them in the first place. To continue delighting customers, it’s essential MVMT keeps true to their theme.
3. Engage with your audience.
Engaging with your audience helps your followers feel valued and, as a result, more connected to your business.
There are plenty of ways to engage with your audience. You might reply to comments on your posts, participate in comment threads, run contests or giveaways, use Instagram Stories polls feature, or give shout-outs to followers on your Stories, particularly if they post something relevant to your brand.
Halo Top Creamery does a fantastic job of engaging with their audience.
They frequently post cute ice cream pictures with the caption “Ice cream is better with friends. Tag a friend you’d like to eat this with.”
A simple “tag a friend” caption is an effective strategy for growing your audience since your followers will then tag friends who might not know about you yet.
Additionally, Halo Top often does contests and giveaways, like this one:
By tagging winners in their posts, Halo Top incentivizes other followers to engage with their brand in the future. Additionally, Halo Top’s giveaways demonstrate their genuine commitment to connecting with their audience.
4. Consider influencer marketing.
As a consumer, you’ve likely seen the recent influx of influencer marketers on Instagram — and for good reason.
Marketers we surveyed in 2021 said it was the marketing trend that offered the highest ROI, above experiential marketing, SEO, and short-form content.
By leveraging the power of an influencer, who is already authentically connected with her audience and seen as a trusted source of information, you’re able to spread brand awareness and drive sales.
Micro-influencing in particular is a strong opportunity for brand endorsement.
You could use your budget and resources to invest in traditional advertising, but it’s often easier to create a more targeted, effective marketing campaign through influencer marketing.
Ultimately, influencers have already cultivated an engaged, loyal following — by identifying the right influencers for your niche, you’re much more likely to find followers who will truly enjoy and support your products or services.
5. Build an ad campaign.
There are two reasons you might use Instagram ads: to spread brand awareness or to increase sales.
It’s critical you focus on one goal when creating an effective ad campaign. An Instagram ad aiming to sell a product will look vastly different from one intending to attract followers.
For instance, consider this Greenchef ad that showed up on my Instagram feed.
With various images of delicious food and an enticing “$40 OFF” discount, it’s likely a high-converting ad. It’s very clear what Greenchef’s goal is: to get people to buy their product.
YouTube, on the other hand, invested in Instagram ads for an entirely different reason.
Their advertisements, featuring well-known singers like Camila Cabello, entice followers to simply follow YouTube Music’s Instagram channel (and, ideally, YouTube’s music channel itself).
To implement an effective campaign, it’s essential you decide what you’re hoping to achieve before you begin creating it.
Once you’ve chosen a goal, you’ll want to create the ad creative. Similar to what we discussed in strategy one, you’ll need to create high-value visual content if you want your ad to be successful. Take a look at other ads on Instagram and consider how you might emulate them.
Additionally, A/B test multiple variations of the same ad (changing the copy, image, or targeted audience for each version), to figure out what works best for your business.
When you’re ready to create your ad, you’ll need to use Facebook Ads Manager. Among other things, Ads Manager lets you narrow in on your target audience (including location, age, and various interests of your ideal demographic), choose your ad objective, and analyze ad performance.
6. Utilize shoppable posts.
If you’re using Instagram for business, then, Shoppable Posts is one feature you’ll want to know well.
It allows you to create posts and tag your products and/services to create a seamless shopping experience directly on the platform. It creates less friction for your followers, increasing the odds of turning them into customers.
Before you begin executing these strategies, you’ll need one thing: an Instagram Business Profile.
What is a business profile on Instagram?
An Instagram business profile is a special account that Instagram offers to brands and organizations. With a business profile, you get access to additional features, such as Instagram Insights and the ability to run ads.
A business profile legitimizes your Instagram account and enables you to add critical information like your company’s business hours, location, and phone number.
Pros and Cons of an Instagram Business Profile
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might be thinking. “I don’t know how I feel about committing to all that.”
Here are some helpful pros and cons so you can determine if a business profile is right for you before jumping in:
Pros
- Access to metrics on how your posts and stories perform.
- Ability to track how your followers engage with your content.
- Access to features necessary to run ad campaigns.
- Gain feature for adding URLs to Stories so you can send warm traffic to your site.
Cons
- Being labeled as a business.
- May experience less organic reach and visibility.
- Must also have a Facebook account to access ad features.
For most brands, the benefits of a business profile outweigh the cons due to the additional features and analytics. However, it’s important to consider your goals before taking action.
How to Create a Business Instagram Profile
In order to create a business profile on Instagram, you must first create a personal Instagram account and then switch it to a business profile. If you already have an Instagram account, skip to the next section for instructions on making the switch.
If you don’t already have an Instagram account, there are two ways to get one:
- From the computer
- From a mobile device (IOS and Android)
For detailed steps, check out our comprehensive article on how to create a business account on Instagram.
How to Switch to Your Business Profile
When you have an Instagram set up, follow these easy steps when you’re ready to make the switch:
1. Go to your profile on the mobile app.
2. Click the hamburger menu (three stacked horizontal bars) in the top right corner.
3. Click the “Settings” gear at the bottom of the menu.
4. Select Account.
5. Choose Linked Accounts.
6. Choose Facebook and follow the prompts to connect your business’s Facebook page.
If you do not have a Facebook Business Page, you will need to create one before completing this step. If your Facebook page is already linked, move on to the next step.
7. Once complete, return to the Settings menu.
8. Select Account.
9. Choose the new option “Switch to Professional Account.”
10. Follow the prompts to add any additional details.
11. Select Done.
You’re now ready to begin implementing your social media strategy on Instagram. From here, you’ll want to determine the audience you want to target, the aesthetic and tone you want to convey, and the content you want to create.
Top Instagram Promotion Tactics of 2022 [Data]
Audience Interaction
On Instagram, the number one strategy marketers plan to leverage for the first time in 2022 is audience interaction.
One of the most effective ways to do this is through IG Live. According to marketers surveyed, it offers the highest return on investment, out of all of Instagram’s features and tools.
That’s why 22% of respondents are investing more in IG Live than any other format on the platform.
Interacting with your audience offers so much more than just engagement. It helps build a sense of community with your followers and allows you to get to know them better.
Content Engagement
While audience interaction takes the #1 spot as the newest strategy, content engagement wins for the overall strategy marketers will invest the most in.
On social media, engagement signals that your content is resonating with your audience. Whether it’s on an in-feed post, a Story, or a live stream, engagement can be a great indicator of your page’s health.
In fact, 17% plan to invest more in it than any other strategy while 43% plan to use it for the first time this year.
Wondering how to make your content more engaging? Try the funny route. Our research shows that funny content is most effective for audience growth, reach, and engagement.
This adds up because funny content tends to be relatable, and that’s usually what gets someone to stop scrolling and pay attention.
The format can also play a role in engagement, with most marketers posting more video than anything else on the platform. Eighty-two percent of marketers surveyed post video content on the platform and the content formats they use most are video-based.
Stories is another tool that can be highly effective for marketers. In fact, those who leverage it are 23% more likely to say their 2021 IG strategy was effective.
Product advertising
With Instagram constantly expanding its shopping tools, it’s no surprise that a top goal for marketers is advertising their products and/or services.
Our research suggests that the use of content centered around products and services will increase in 2022. For 39% of marketers, it will be their first time leveraging this type of content on the platform.
Those who did prioritize this content in 2021 say that it offered the second-highest ROI of any content type on the platform.
When it comes to IG shopping tools, 79% of marketers surveyed say they’ve used them, and 22% plan to invest in this feature the most.
Whatever your goal is, whether it’s increasing brand awareness or generating more revenue, using Instagram for business gets you one step closer to achieving it. While not all of Instagram’s tools will offer a high ROI, they are all worth trying to see what works best for your audience.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
MARKETING
Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology
Page conversion rates have ALWAYS been a problem. The simple fact is most people don’t convert even on the most optimized pages.
What’s why traditional retargeting on ad networks has been so dang powerful. While retargeted leads come cheap, they still aren’t free. Worse, you’re back competing against your competition in the ol’ ad auction system.
For the last 6 years, I’ve been using a tactic called Inbox Retargeting to identify who lands on my key pages and directly reach out to them in their inbox.
No more ads. No more auctions. Just a targeted contact that showed they were interested, but didn’t quite take the leap yet.
Before I dive into the “What’s” and “How’s”, this tactic can only be used in the good ol’ US of A. If you aren’t in the states or don’t have clients in the states, you’re out of luck. Sorry!
How It Works
Inbox retargeting doesn’t take a lot of heavy lifting. I’ll share the strategy next but I wanted to start with some of the logistics.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer or coder, so keep that in mind if technical or legal questions pop up.
If you have a website, you have tracking scripts, e.g., GA4, the Facebook Pixel, Heatmap software, etc…
To get started with Inbox retargeting, you just need to be able to copy and paste two scripts on your site:
- A collection script: This fires and tries to identify the visitor
A suppression script: You’d fire this on your conversion confirmation pages, you don’t want people who converted to land in your Inbox Retargeting campaigns.
The tech works off of a database of contacts in the United States that are eligible for emails, so it’s completely above board with your ESP. However, you’ll want to do a few things before you start treating them like a regular member of your email list.
We initially tested this on one of our paid media campaigns. We already had a really strong campaign that we wanted to squeeze more leads out of…and boy did we.
We were driving traffic from Meta (Facebook for the OGs) to this landing page:
This page converts at 58%. Yeah, that’s a humble brag…deal with it.
Even with a 58% conversion rate, we’re still missing out on 42% of the traffic we’ve already paid for. That’s kind of a bummer.
After we added the collection script to the page, they were able to capture a lot more leads. The conversion rate jumped from 58% to a very sweet 87% – that’s a 50% increase!
That was the impact on a single page, that’s when we knew it was time to go bigger.
The Strategy
Most of the tools out there, whether it’s Retention.com or Customers.ai, are going to charge based on the number of contacts. So it can get pretty easy to burn through contact credits if you run the script on every page you manage, your site and your clients’ sites included.
That’s why you’ll want to make sure to select pages that capture intent versus targeting all of your traffic.
ID Key Pages
Here are some of the pages you should consider adding the collection script:
- Campaign Landing Pages – If you’re paying to send someone to a page, the referring source piqued their interest. If they didn’t convert, you’d definitely want to follow up.
- Product Pages – If someone is viewing this page they’re evaluating a particular product they were interested in.
- High Intent/Value Content Pages – This could be your pillar content on your blog pages, podcast pages, or your top level service pages.
- Registration Pages – This is a subset of a landing page, but if someone got all the way to a registration or sigh up page, they’re a prime candidate for outreach.
- Cart Pages – People abandon carts all the time. If you weren’t able to catch their details during checkout, this is an ideal opportunity.
Effectively it’s any page where you’re pushing a specific action. While the above pages are the pages to choose from, a homepage is acceptable but will require a little more finesse when you follow up.
Map to Email Campaigns
Now that you’ve identified where you’re going to identify leads, you’ll need to map it to your automation tool.
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Most tools have a direct integration with your email service provider, but worst case scenario you may have to pass the data through a no code integration tool like Zapier.
Once you’ve worked out the digital plumbing, you’ll want to follow up based on the page the contact was collected on. Here’s how you should approach follow up:
- For Campaign Landing Pages – Give them the specific asset. They were interested in it, you’ve got their contact information, just hand over the goods. This builds good will at the start of the relationship.
- Product Pages – Send over the details of the product or product category they were viewing. This could be as simple as a reminder or you could build goodwill with a special offer or coupon.
- High Intent/Value Content Pages – Send over some of your best content or freebies that move people to the next phase of the Customer Value Journey.
- Registration Pages – Treat these like an “abandoned cart” type of email and get them to take that next step.
- Cart Pages – Same as “Registration Pages” but it’s, you know, an actual abandoned cart reminder. Similar to the product pages you could entice them to come back with a deal or coupon.
- Homepages – If you do run these on the homepage, you’ll need to do more of a reintroduction then transition to showcasing your best stuff.
Email Structure
The initial message you send needs to have a very specific flow. There are four critical things that need to happen when they open up your Inbox Retargeting message.
First, remind them about who you are and how they know you. This can be as simple as a, “Hey, thanks for stopping by…” message. Have some fun with it.
Next, you need to provide highly specific value based on their browsing intent. If you get this wrong, they’re just going to file your message under SPAM.
After that, you’ve got to set expectations with what they’re getting and now you’ll be communicating with them moving forward.
And Finally, you need to give them an EASY OUT. These campaigns have our highest unsubscribe rate, but that’s because we outright ask people to unsubscribe if they don’t want any additional contact.
Once you’e gone through this, you treat them like one of your regular subscribers with all your fancy ascension automations, content emails, and promotional emails.
Here are the email stats from one of our PPC Campaigns:
With an average open rate of 53.87%, we know there’s a base line interest in the deliverable. The click rate is DANG good for messaging visitors who didn’t convert.
Sure the unsubscribe rate is a little high for this campaign, but that is intentional. We push them to opt-out in the first email so we don’t get dinged later with complaints.
The Payoff: An Additional 109k Last Year
I mean, who doesn’t want another cool 100 grand for adding a script to your website and writing a couple of emails? Here’s how the numbers work out:
Last year, we identified 3,714 leads using this method. IMPORTANT: When I was pulling these numbers, I realized we installed the code wrong on some pages and missed out on about another 2k leads…oops!
Our average lead cost was ~$7, so the leads themself were a $26,000 additional value. This alone would be a reason to use the tech.
BUT JUSTIN, did they convert?!
Yes!
We closed $36,000 in IPPC business from this lead source. For what we spent on those leads we’re looking at a 750% ROAS. Not too shabby.
The rest of the money we made was by selling this service to our clients. Since we run paid ads for clients, this method is a complete no brainer. We ran a pilot program and only offered this to a handful of clients last year, we averaged about 4k/month in sales.
We sold clients the leads at ~$2/lead for some of the niches we work in, that’s a steal.
If you decide to sell this you need to make sure the client knows these are lower intent leads and will require longer term nurtures. If you follow the email strategy I shared above, you’ll be good to go!
Protip: Charge for building the follow up sequence!
So that’s it! If you’re running your own business or are an agency owner, you’ve got to consider Inbox Retargeting. Though, I do have some bad news…
Not to be “Chicken Little” but this is starting to get way more attention, there are services popping out of the woodwork so this will become a table stakes method. So get ahead of this today.
MARKETING
What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]
Have you ever felt in the dark when it comes to understanding the real impact your marketing dollars are having across multiple channels?
Determining where and how conversions are occurring is crucial in optimizing your budget to drive the most impact with your marketing budget. Media mix modeling (MMM) is an analytical approach used to gauge the effectiveness of various marketing channels in driving sales and conversions. This method allows us to decipher the true influence of advertising spend across diverse platforms by accounting for a myriad of factors, both within their control (like media channel spend, promotional strategies) and outside their control (such as economic conditions, competitor actions, and seasonal influences).
One of the key strengths of media mix modeling is its ability to incorporate long-term brand building effects alongside immediate sales impacts, offering a comprehensive view of marketing effectiveness. It helps in identifying which channels are most efficient, how different channels influence each other, and how external factors affect marketing performance.
Media mix modeling is a powerful tool for marketers seeking to optimize their marketing investments. By providing a holistic view of how various factors contribute to sales and conversions, MMM enables data-driven decisions that enhance marketing efficiency and business growth.
In this article, we explore how media mix modeling works, and how businesses can use analytics to drive smarter ad spend decisions.
What Is Media Mix Modeling?
Media mix modeling (MMM) is a type of analysis that measures the impact of media buys across multiple channels, showing the role various elements play in achieving a desired outcome—often a conversion or revenue KPI. With this information, marketing stakeholders are able to make specific adjustments to campaign spend to improve their progress toward reaching a given goal.
Media mix modeling can be used to address common brand marketing questions and pain points, including:
- Which of our marketing efforts are having the biggest impact on reaching our goals—or, more simply—what’s working?
- How big of an impact does seasonality have on our marketing performance?
- How closely is our performance tied to promotional efforts?
- Are shifting consumer trends negatively or positively impacting outcomes?
- Which specific mix of spend allocation drives the highest ROI?
- How will these channels likely perform in the future based on their optimized spend allocation?
“Media mix modeling is a top-down , privacy resilient approach that evaluates how historical media activity, promotions, pricing, seasonality, and uncontrollable factors—such as economic activity—impact key business outcomes such as sales revenue. MMM is a scientific approach to attribution in the sense that it applies statistical methods to analyze and interpret marketing data, providing a systematic understanding of how different marketing channels contribute to overall business goals in the broader context of the market. The quality of insights derived from MMM heavily depends on the quality and granularity of the data used.”
— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti
MMM leverages aggregate data, and can measure both online (digital) and offline (traditional) advertising channel performance, including (but not limited to): paid media channels such as social media channels, traditional print advertising, linear TV advertising, and other performance marketing efforts, organic media, operational factors like promotions, external factors like seasonality, economic conditions, outcome KPIs such as sales revenue, new customers, and conversions.
How Does Media Mix Modeling Work?
The MMM framework is a type of statistical analysis that uses statistical methods and econometric models such as a regression analysis. This econometric model helps analysts determine the strength of relationships between a single dependent variable and an array of independent variables.
Media mix modeling analysis measures the impact of your media spend today, and is also helpful in predicting the future outcome of your marketing investments on a given variable.
Example:
Let’s assume a scenario where our target metric, or dependent variable, is revenue, a critical indicator of business success. We aim to dissect the influence of various marketing initiatives on this revenue. These initiatives, our independent variables, encompass a diverse array of digital advertising campaigns, including those run on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, as well as broader Display and Streaming platforms.
The number of independent variables under scrutiny does not dilute our core objective. The mission is to measure the relationship between the marketing endeavors and the revenue they generate. This involves not only identifying the direct contributions of each campaign to revenue but also understanding the nuanced interplay between them by observing how changing aspects of those independent variables impacts the chosen business outcome
What can MMM Measure?
When using MMM to assess campaign success, marketers should leverage statistical methods and econometric models to get the most accurate picture possible. Data quality is essential in achieving an accurate media mix analysis, so take any needed time to clean your data before using it in your analysis.
Key elements an MMM equation can measure include:
- Base and incremental sales volume impact
- Channel effectiveness and return on investment
- Marketing spend saturation
Media Mix Modeling vs. Data-Driven Attribution Modeling
Like media mix modeling, attribution modeling also studies the efficiency of marketing strategies — but there are important differences.
Attribution modeling is a general term that refers to tracking engagement to better understand how specific tactics drive action at the user level. This modeling works well for analyzing specific customer touchpoints, focusing on elements like how a consumer converted, which creative on which channel led to that conversion, and what the expected ROI could be if more ad budget were shifted to that channel.
Media mix modeling takes a higher-level, more comprehensive picture. This modeling isn’t designed to measure user-level engagement like impressions and clicks, rather its primary function is measuring the impact of an entire touchpoint on specific marketing objectives.
Data-driven attribution modeling and MMM each have their own set of strengths. It’s not a matter of one being better than the other, rather one being better-suited to different types of marketing analysis.
For example:
- The precision of the data-driven attribution: Let’s assume you want to invest more spend in a social ad campaign during the holiday season. While MMM is an option for determining where to allocate those dollars, data-driven attribution excels in dissecting the intricate customer journey, offering a microscopic view of user interactions. For instance, if you’re keen on understanding the exact value of a single click from your social media campaign, Data-Driven Attribution can illuminate the path.
- The holistic perspective of the media mix modeling: Media mix modeling, can consider the impact of offline actions and initiatives. Unlike the more narrowly focused attribution models, which might overemphasize the first or last touchpoint, MMM assesses the collective impact of all channels over time. This makes it an indispensable tool for strategic planning and long-term investment decisions in your marketing portfolio.
“Attribution modeling is based on a bottom-up approach while media mix modeling takes a top-down approach. Media mix modeling provides a long-term view of the marketing ROI of media activity, while attribution modeling evaluates individual-level activity to provide a short term view of marketing ROI.”
— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti
Why Does MMM Make Sense for a Post-cookie/Post-IDFA World?
In the post-cookie and post-IDFA landscape, where privacy concerns and regulatory changes limit access to individual user-level data, media mix modeling has become a pivotal analytical tool. MMM’s emphasis on overall marketing spend allocation and its proficiency in establishing cause-and-effect models, address the challenges posed by the diminishing availability of explicit conversion information, providing marketers with a privacy-respecting and insightful approach to navigate the evolving digital advertising ecosystem.
An Example of Media Mix Modeling
With the right media mix model, a business can measure their past marketing performance to improve future ROI by optimizing the allocation of the media budget by channel and/or tactic, including: traditional and digital media channels, promotions, pricing, competitor spend, economic conditions, weather, and more.
Example:
An international ecommerce brand wanted to forecast their second-half of the year and create an optimal media mix to make their marketing dollars work smarter. A combination of client data, marketing data, and machine learning were required to create a powerful, custom media mix model.
To build the model, the business used 2+ years of digital marketing and revenue data, analyzing it by market, tactic, and day. The data was then used to create model to assess future spend showing how changes in investment across channels could impact revenue and sales.
The full digital media mix model gave the ecommerce brand a detailed analysis of where to optimize their spend across all digital marketing channels.
One recommendation was to shift dollars away from social—which historically had been at or near 30%—to paid search. This recommendation came with another layer of insight: The brand realized they were overinvesting in awareness campaigns, and needed to invest more heavily in capturing current demand during the 2nd half of the year.
Results: Working with a robust media mix model, the brand was able to break down how much media spend was needed by each channel in order to achieve the 30% YoY revenue goal they targeted.
The Benefits & Challenges of Media Mix Modeling
MMM helps you accurately connect all the dots, leveraging (ideally) a wealth of provided data, to understand how disparate aspects of marketing campaigns work together in helping you reach your business goals.
Benefits of Media Mix Modeling
The benefits of MMM are multifaceted, offering marketers a strategic edge in navigating the intricacies of their advertising efforts. Let’s dive into each benefit in detail…
Omnichannel Campaigns: MMM excels in providing insights for omnichannel campaigns, allowing marketers to understand and optimize the impact of their initiatives across various channels. This capability is crucial in today’s interconnected digital landscape, where consumers engage with brands through diverse platforms.
Improved Oversight Over Media Spend Impact: MMM provides a comprehensive view of the impact of media spend, enabling marketers to assess the effectiveness of their investments. This improved oversight ensures a clearer understanding of how each component of the media mix contributes to overall campaign success.
Media Spend Optimization: With MMM, marketers can optimize their media spend by identifying the most impactful channels and touchpoints. This data-driven approach allows for strategic adjustments in budget allocation, ensuring that resources are directed towards the avenues that yield the highest return on ad spend.
Effective Targeting of Audiences: MMM’s analysis helps in refining audience targeting strategies. By understanding which elements of the marketing mix resonate most with specific demographics, marketers can tailor their campaigns to effectively reach and engage their target audience segments.
Forecasting with Certainty: One of MMM’s strengths lies in its ability to forecast results with a high degree of certainty. This forecasting capability empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on predictive analytics, aiding in long-term planning and goal setting.
Reduced Reliance on Personally Identifiable Information (PII): MMM minimizes the reliance on personally identifiable information for analysis. This is especially crucial in an era where privacy concerns are more important than ever.
Media mix modeling is a comprehensive and powerful tool, offering a range of benefits that contribute to a more effective, data-driven, and privacy-conscious approach to marketing strategy and decision-making. While there are many benefits to MMM, there are challenges as well. Let’s look into common challenges of MMM in our next section.
Challenges of Media Mix Modeling
MMM grows increasingly complex as the media landscape becomes more fragmented, and the customer journey more personalized. Whereas in the past, advertisers may have wanted to measure something as simple as the impact of a print ad in a Cleveland newspaper, today’s consumers are exposed to brands in a wide variety of locations and formats, from a subway transit poster to a Sponsored post on Instagram.
Working with high-quality data is important in any measurement initiative, but for MMM to work effectively, it also needs a lot of data to build a reliable model. For example, if you wanted your model to consider the performance impact of seasonality, it would ideally need at least three full seasons (three years) of data to consider in its analysis.
This makes media mix modeling a ‘long game’ initiative with infrequent reporting by its nature. Brands and advertisers who are more accustomed to daily or weekly updates may struggle with ‘waiting out’ the analysis.
Because it’s not designed to make considerations based on user-level data, instead providing aggregate insights, media mix modeling offers limited insights on brand impact, personalized targeting, and customer experience. However, advanced models are available that can provide highly granular insights, but traditional MMM provides aggregate insights.
Common Misconceptions About Media Mix Modeling
Media mix modeling, like many other analytics solutions, has also become a marketing buzzword that has generated its fair share of misconceptions.
Here are a few of the most common misconceptions around media mix modeling.
Media Mix Models Are Not Transparent
With large datasets and statistical analysis involved in media mix modeling, the methods behind the technique have been critiqued for their obscurity. If there is no perceived transparency in the process, how does a brand know if its media mix model is really accurate?
Any organization specializing in media mix modeling should provide a transparent approach, with deliverables such as outlines, milestones, and performance reports. Additionally, you may want to consider partnering with an agency that truly understands how media mix modeling aligns with your needs and expectations. Every business is unique and each media mix model is based on multiple factors.
Media Mix Models Do Not Provide Real-time Data
Today, results are often measured by the timeliness of their delivery, with the current digital marketplace allowing for almost instantaneous real-time data. Media mix models do actually provide compelling real-time marketing insights, perfect for evaluating new campaigns, new competitors, and assessing pricing actions or changes in promotional strategies.
A powerful partner in media mix modeling will provide sophisticated tools and real-time approaches to satisfy your business performance assessments. Your partner should also be able to provide forecasting, simulation, or AI- and machine-learning-integrated models to suggest future movements.
Media Mix Modeling is Biased to Offline Channels
Though media mix strategies do integrate and consider offline channels in their approaches, media mix modeling also considers all digital channels — including display, email, paid search, social, and more. Remember—it’s considering your media mix. If that includes ten different channels and you provide enough high-quality data for each, they will all be considered in your marketing mix analysis.
In fact, as customers have become more intertwined with digital channels, media marketing models have adapted to go even deeper into the analyses provided by those channels’ respective insights to support better budgeting choices and customer segmentation reports.
Conclusion: MMM Closes the Loop on Marketing Performance
In an ever-evolving digital landscape, MMM’s adaptability to the post-cookie/post-IDFA world positions it as an essential tool for marketers. As businesses seek to connect the dots, leverage data, and make strategic decisions, MMM is a crucial ally in the dynamic realm of mixed media advertising.
“At Tinuiti, we leverage measurement best practices such as MMM and incrementality to understand media effectiveness, predict future outcomes, create deeper insights, analyzing what-if scenarios to provide recommendations that optimize media performance. This helps brands understand what channels they should be investing in, how they should shift budgets (media mix), creating a high-level view of what channels are driving overall sales and ROI. Our goal here is to deliver growth for our clients by maximizing the return on investment through best in class measurement”
— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti
At Tinuiti, we know, embrace, and utilize MMM. Our Rapid Media Mix Modeling sets a new standard in the market with its exceptional speed, precision, and transparency.
Our proprietary measurement technology, Bliss Point by Tinuiti, allows us to measure what marketers have previously struggled to measure – the optimal level of investment to maximize impact and efficiency. But this measurement is not just to go back and validate that we’ve done the right things. This measurement is real-time informing what needs to happen next.
Curious about how we can tailor strategies to hit your unique marketing bliss point, including Rapid Media Mix Modeling? We’re eager to chat. Contact us today for details.
MARKETING
Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!
Designing and developing an email campaign is a complex mechanism; a few things will inevitably escape your attention during the process. So, before you hit that send button, you must draw up a foolproof checklist to ensure every single component in your campaign is in its rightful place. Wondering what an ideal pre-flight checklist looks like? We’ve carefully compiled everything necessary in this blog. Read on to find out!
Subject Line and Pre-header Text
A subject line can make or break your emails. It’s the first thing about your email that reaches the audience, and if it fails to hit the right notes, you’ll have a tough time convincing your subscribers to engage with your emails.
What makes a subject line tick, you ask? Let’s take a look!
- Your subject line should prioritize an economy of words; this will help you on two accounts- firstly, a crisp and to-the-point subject line increases your probability of catching the reader’s attention. Secondly, longer subject lines run the risk of being clipped on mobile devices, thereby spoiling the subscriber’s user experience. By keeping your subject lines concise, you eliminate this possibility.
- Ensure your subject line clearly explains what readers can expect upon opening the email. The more guesswork your subject line demands of readers, the less likely they are to open your email.
- Steer clear of using words that might be considered spammy. With email filters becoming more and more sophisticated, usage of any sort of contentious term in your subject line will result in ISPs flagging your email as spam.
- Personalize your subject line. In a climate of increasingly crowded email boxes, personalization is one technique you simply can’t afford to overlook.
Besides fine-tuning your subject line, you also need to pay attention to your pre-header text. Building upon the context provided by your subject line, pre-header texts give readers an additional nudge to open their emails. Two crucial things that you must keep in mind while curating your pre-header texts are:
- It must exist only as an extension of your subject line; it must not try to introduce any new ideas on its own.
- It must be mobile-optimized.
Broken Links
Given that the links embedded in your email eventually facilitate a conversion, it is imperative that you thoroughly evaluate their health prior to delivering your emails. Broken links aren’t just bad for business; they also spoil a subscriber’s user experience.
Here are a few things you must check after embedding a link in your email:
- This might sound trivial, but do check if the link you have inserted is the one you intended to or not; the only thing perhaps worse than having a broken link is having an irrelevant one.
- Check that the link is redirecting the user to the desirable destination.
- If the download of a resource is supposed to be triggered by clicking the link, check if that’s functioning properly; you wouldn’t want subscribers clicking umpteen times on your link only for it to return nothing.
Accessibility
Apart from acing your content and design, you must also work towards making your email campaigns accessible; people making use of assistive technologies must be able to engage with and comprehend your emails in an absolutely hassle-free manner.
Given below are a few measures that will help you make your campaigns accessible to all:
- Organize your email content. Break down long paragraphs into small sections of 2-3 lines. Use bullets and subheadings wherever necessary. This will make it easy for assistive technologies such as screen readers to parse through your content.
- Write descriptive alt texts for the images you’re including. Besides improving accessibility, alt texts also enable search engines to crawl your page more efficiently, thereby boosting your SEO.
- Use semantic markup; this will help screen readers navigate your emails in a smooth fashion.
- Try to stick to a single-column layout while designing your email template.
This email from AllTrails is an ideal example of an accessible template.
Inbox Preview
Different email clients render emails differently, even if only slightly. Hence, before sending out your emails, you must preview them across different environments and clients to check if they appear as desired. If you are designing your email for dark mode, too, it becomes that much more important to preview it before delivering.
Wrapping It Up
For your email campaigns to be able to drive maximum impact, they must be free of blemishes of all kinds. We hope the pre-flight checklist we shared above proves to be of help to you when you sit down to create your next campaign.
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