Connect with us

MARKETING

Content Writing Examples, Tips, and Resources

Published

on

Content Writing Examples, Tips, and Resources

Consuming great writing is like listening to a singer. If the performer makes an emotional connection with me – even though they miss a few notes – I eagerly lock into the rest of the song and anticipate the next performance.

Your words must be powerful and effective as well if you want to captivate as many of your readers as possible.

Content writing isn’t an easy task. Whether you craft words for B2B or B2C audiences, the challenges can be many. I’ve created a diverse set of tips, tools, and resources to aid in shaping and modifying your work. It’s not an exhaustive collection. Some ideas may seem familiar. Others will be fresh.

My hope is that you’ll walk away with some insights or new tools to help address or minimize the content creation challenges you face.

Let’s get to it.

Advertisement

1. Convey much with few words

I find inspiration in ad copy that takes little space to reflect a strong message. Sure, you’ll need to write much more than a couple of sentences for your content marketing, but simplicity has merit. How well you write always sets the stage for what’s to come.

Creativity can emerge in many ways. Sometimes, it’s a simple starting point. It might be wise to reflect the times and a significant sentiment. These examples tap into beauty, memes, a health crisis, and a love of pets.

I was impressed with this line from Dove, “You’re more beautiful than you think.” It’s part of Dove Real Beauty Sketches, a six-minute YouTube video with 11 million views since 2013. The content looks at the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how others see us.

In 2019, Spotify gained notice with its Spotify Everywhere meme-themed campaign. For example, on one billboard, the left side read: “Me: It’s Okay; the breakup was mutual.” On the right side, it read: “Also Me: Sad Indie” (complete with the app’s music search imagery). The simple, creatively delivered message went deep into a full range of emotions familiar to countless people.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to numerous ad campaigns that underscore the value of brevity. Nike handled it this way: “If you ever dreamed of playing for millions around the world, now is your chance. Play inside, play for the world.”

CARA Welfare Philippines (Compassion and Responsibility for Animals) chose contrasting images – neglect and recovery – and four words to reinforce the message of caring: “Same dog, different owner.”

Advertisement

Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

Image source

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

2. Nail down your headlines

Headline writing involves many challenges – tone, length, etc. This headline from OptinMonster appears to be straightforward with its good use of a numeral, direct, etc. But the phrase “you need to use” caught my attention and elevated the article’s value in my mind.

1646047129 458 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

One practical tool to help you nail down your headlines is the free Title Generator from The HOTH.

One practical tool to help you nail down your headlines is the free #TitleGenerator from @the_hoth, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent. #WritingTips Click To Tweet

3. Focus on clarity when you write

Zendesk elevates its customer service by writing briefly to illuminate the difference among customer support, customer self-service, and customer engagement. With a few words, Zendesk communicates that it cares to its customers and wants them to access the best resource to help them right away.

Advertisement

1646047129 69 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

A word of caution: Don’t be so creative that a reader struggles to detect your main point. Be careful with humor, which can fall flat for the reader.

4. Know your audience

You need to speak your audience’s language, but that doesn’t mean settling for jargon. Typically, an informal, conversational approach works best when you’re creating content.

An informational, conversational approach works best when you’re creating #content via @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent. #WritingTips Click To Tweet

Other informal writing ideas include writing in first or second person and avoiding sentences that begin with vague words like this or that.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

5. Win your readers over

How does your content inspire readers or get them to care?

Advertisement

Some suggestions include:

  • Focus on actionable content that they could use right away.
  • Use profanity sparingly if at all. It can distract readers who wonder why those words were included.
  • Link to other websites, newsletters, and blogs to provide added value to readers and help your content establish credibility.

1646047129 518 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

6. Get visitors to take action

Sometimes it’s a simple word or phrase that prompts someone to take the next step. Buffer offers a list of 189 words. Among the list are a dozen that imply exclusivity to motivate readers:

  • Members only
  • Login required
  • Class full
  • Membership now closed
  • Ask for an invitation
  • Apply to be one of our beta testers
  • Exclusive offers
  • Become an insider
  • Be one of the few
  • Get it before everybody else
  • Be the first to hear about it
  • Only available to subscribers

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

7. Length depends on the context

It’s easy to stick to some content length rules and preferences.

For example, maximize the 35 characters available in a Google ad headline. On social media, though, you might improve engagement by stopping well short of the maximum character limits.

It gets tougher with website pages, articles, and blog posts. I understand that short pieces (let’s say anything under 500 words) are easier to consume for online readers. But longer content can draw in people as well. Visuals in the core content and within the site architecture can support your text.

Odds are you have guidelines that dictate length but allow exceptions. If you don’t write enough, you disappoint someone by not devoting sufficient attention to a topic. If you provide too many details, you might overwhelm a reader who might miss your primary ideas.

Advertisement

Editors and writers should agree on whether the article is a suitable length. You can discard information that doesn’t quite fit. But in the content writing and editing process, you might identify opportunities to use some portions for future content (with additions or modifications).

From a search engine optimization perspective, longer content is always best. A website, for example, can get by with shorter pieces if it becomes authoritative through its age, the number of pages, inbound links, and more. However, extended content often helps generate high rankings for targeted keyword phrases and similar words.

From a #SEO perspective, longer #content is always best, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent. #WritingTips Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

8. Ensure your content can be scanned

Readers skip a lot of words. Make it easy for them to discover your key points by including:

  • Short paragraphs
  • Subheads
  • Bulleted lists
  • Bolded text
  • Words in color
  • Links

You don’t need to write long sentences to get your point across. Short ones work in your favor. It’s the same thing with words. Here are some common examples of better choices, note that sometimes a few short words sound better than one long word:

  • Show, not indicate
  • Get rid of, not eliminate
  • Use, not utilize
  • To, not in order to
  • Help, not facilitate
  • Get, not obtain
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Content Readability: A Primer

9. Understand fair use

As a writer, you may occasionally use other content. It’s not always enough to use quotation marks and cite the source.

Fair use depends on several factors, including whether your content is used for commercial purposes and its potential impact on the market value of the copyrighted work.

Advertisement

I mostly worry about the length of the original source. If I quote 100 words from a 250-word blog, that would be too much. A lawyer would have the best advice, but I would limit the quote to 25 words in that case. Books are a little easier. If you quote 300 words from a 150-page book, you would be fine. Poems and song lyrics are a danger zone because they’re often short. I’ve cited as little as possible from them. It’s always best to get legal counsel before publishing the final content.

It’s always best to get legal counsel before publishing the final content, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent. #WritingTips Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

10. Evaluate sentence structure with the Hemingway App

Content writers have many reference tools to make their jobs a little easier and improve their work. Among the best is the Hemingway app, which provides immediate feedback on content structure, including sentence formatting. With the website version, you can replace the default text with your own.

The Hemingway app identifies potentially unnecessary adverbs, warns about passive voice, and triggers alerts to dull, complicated words.

1646047129 213 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

11. Create compelling content with better words

Jon Morrow of Smart Blogger offers a collection of words that can make a difference in what you write: 317 Power Words That’ll Instantly Make You a Better Writer. Here are 15 of them:

Advertisement
  • Agony
  • Apocalypse
  • Armageddon
  • Assault
  • Backlash
  • Beating
  • Blinded
  • Fooled
  • Frantic
  • Frightening
  • Gambling
  • Gullible
  • Hack
  • Hazardous
  • Hoax
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Words That Convert: Test, Learn, Repeat

12. Use a topic tool for inspiration

HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator works well to get your creative content writing juices flowing. Just fill in the fields with three nouns to get some ideas.

For example, if you input the words: car, truck, and SUV, HubSpot delivers these ideas:

  • The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About Cars
  • How To Solve the Biggest Problems With Trucks
  • 10 Quick Tips About SUVs
  • 10 Signs You Should Invest in Cars
  • Why We Love Trucks (And Why You Should, Too!)

1646047129 433 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

13. Evaluate the complexity of your sentences

The Readability Test Tool scores your content to reveal the grade level and the complexity of words.

1646047129 270 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

Readability Test from WebFX also creates a reading score. Reach your audience by writing to their preferred level. This simple app uses several indexes to assess the readability of your text. Then, you can adjust.

Use the @webfx #ReadabilityTest tool to assess the readability of your #content, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent. #WritingTips Click To Tweet

14. Analyze the potential impact of your headlines

Size up headlines with the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer, which reveals an emotional marketing value score.

Advertisement

1646047129 259 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

A similar tool, the CoSchedule Blog Post Headline Analyzer, looks at the tone, grammar, structure, and more. Pull readers into your content with great headlines. Headline Studio applies writing and SEO principles to evaluate your headline; then it suggests ways to make it better by identifying areas for improvement, such as the use of uncommon, emotional, and power words.

1646047129 398 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

15. Use headline words that resonate

BuzzSumo evaluated 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn. One insight revealed “how-to” headlines were among the most popular in B2B content – 2.8 times more than its nearest competitor based on LinkedIn shares.

1646047129 384 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

Get more tips from CMI’s article How to Write Headlines That Get Your Brand What It Wants [Checklist].

16. Know SEO responsibilities

Sometimes writers create content with multiple purposes. They have the burden of blending SEO into the content. I frame it as a burden because it’s one more variable to deal with. If you have a knack for SEO and goals you can measure, it’s not a burden.

Unfortunately, you sometimes don’t know what realistic keywords to pursue. Aim too low and you use rarely searched keywords. Aspire for something too competitive and the content won’t rank.

How are you evaluating keywords? Learn how to find your sweet spot with keyword selection (and how to appear on the first page of Google). Identify potential keywords by using tools like:

Advertisement

17. Get writing right with good grammar

Proper grammar is a necessity; you want to get everything correct to satisfy readers (and bosses). Try Grammarly.

Improve your writing with this cloud-based, AI editor. Grammarly automates grammar, spelling and punctuations checks, often giving better, cleaner content options. The tool also alerts writers to passive voice, suggests opportunities to be concise, and assesses overall tone.

18. Recognize common writing mistakes

Grammar Girl created by Mignon Fogarty, founder of Quick and Dirty Tips, outlines some common mistakes, such as this advice on “do’s and don’ts” and its inclusion of options:

Unless your editor wishes otherwise, if you write books, spell it dos and don’ts; and if you write for newspapers, magazines, or the web, spell it do’s and don’ts. If you’re writing for yourself, spell it any way you want.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 15 Content Development Mistakes To Avoid

19. Go beyond grammar

Save time and energy with ProWritingAid. It eliminates the need to reread to polish your content. This AI editing software offers more than grammar checks. It checks for vague wording, sentence length variation, and overuse of adverbs and passive voice. The tool also identifies complicated or run-on sentences.

20. Use parallel construction in writing

Parallel construction organizes the text and relieves your readers of expending mental energy to piece together the thoughts.

For example, this mish-mash list is not parallel because the sentence structures vary:

Advertisement
  • It could be time to look over your business software contract.
  • Consider the best products.
  • If you want the product to benefit your company, include others’ point of view.

The list is parallel because every sentence starts the same way – with a verb.

  • Review your business software contract.
  • Shop for the best products based on features, costs, and support options.
  • Ask key members of your team for their perspectives, including productivity barriers.

21. Know when to break the infinitive rule

Avoid split infinitives. However, go for conversational over grammatically correct structures if the proper wording reads awkwardly.

22. Be reader-friendly

You’re not writing a doctoral thesis. Don’t use a $10 word when a $1 word will do. Vary sentence lengths. Don’t force readers to think too much.

Don’t use a $10 word when a $1 word will do, says @mikeonlinecoach via @CMIContent. #WritingTips Click To Tweet

23. Flee the jargon

Turn to Unsuck It to rate your content and find alternative language. Think of it as a synonym finder for business jargon. It’s occasionally irreverent and always entertaining.

 24. Be conscious of antecedents

When you’re using pronouns, make sure it’s clear what the pronoun refers to.

25. Read aloud

If your content doesn’t flow well as you speak it, it may not work for the reader. Pay attention to when you take too many pauses or pause in places where no comma exists. Adjust your text – add a comma or break the sentence into two.

26. Don’t overuse words

Redundancy bores readers. To figure out whether you’re committing this sin, paste your text into the Word It Out tool. The word cloud reveals those used most frequently in your text:

Advertisement

1646047129 18 Content Writing Examples Tips and Resources

Similarly, WordCounter detects whether you’re using the same words too often. Use Thesaurus.com to find alternatives.

27. Use active voice

With active voice, your subject does the action. With passive voice, the action happens to someone or something. Let your subject do the acting to bring more power to your content.

28. Watch out for typos and misspellings

If you can’t do the easy things right, it hurts your credibility. Typos and misspellings may cause your readers to move on.

29. Respect your company’s style standards

For example, is it web site or website? What’s in your brand’s style guide?

30. Leverage plagiarism checkers

Here are two tools worth exploring to ensure the content isn’t a copycat:

  • Unicheck – Verify the originality of work with plagiarism detection. You can spot outright copying and minor text modifications in unscrupulous submissions.
  • Copyscape – Protect your content and your reputation. Copyscape uncovers plagiarism in purchased content and detects plagiarism by others of your original work.

31. Don’t forget text has a starring role in video

Words appear in blog posts or descriptions of product features and benefits. But writers also can shine in video scripts along with set designers, actors, and filmmakers. Writers can take any topic and help make it captivating.

Boat Trader’s Stomping Ground was a finalist in the Content Marketing Awards in 2021 for Distribution – Best Use of Video in Content Marketing:

Advertisement

32. Keep track of words

Meet your word count goals and improve word choice with the WordCounter tool. It also helps identify keywords and their appropriate frequency of use.

33. Automate writing – to a degree

Autofill your most common phrases and shorten your keyboard time with TextExpander. This automated writing tool improves team collaboration by anticipating the most commonly used phrases.

34. Stay on track

Meet every deadline with Todoist. The tool organizes your tasks and schedule. Throw away your paper lists. Keep track of progress and get help as you delegate tasks.

35. Monitor relevant topics

With Feedly, you can stay informed about what matters most and avoid information overload. This AI assistant learns your preferences, then culls and curates content from the internet that you want and need.

36. Adjust title formats

Speed your formatting tasks with TitleCase. The tool converts your title into various cases – all CAPS, hyphen, etc., so you don’t have to rekey or reformat.

Advertisement

37. Improve the collaboration process

Ease commenting and collaborating with digital sticky notes from Ideaflip. They’re simple to virtually move, making it effortless to organize thoughts and ideas before weaving them into text.

Share your favorite writing tricks

What content creation and copywriting productivity tools do you favor? What do you do each day to make your writing tasks just a little easier? Please share in the comments.

All tools in this article are identified by the author.

Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to workday or weekly emails from CMI.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute




Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

Published

on

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.

Advertisement

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.

1710795438 253 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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:

1710795438 272 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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.

Advertisement

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Product Pages – If someone is viewing this page they’re evaluating a particular product they were interested in.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – This could be your pillar content on your blog pages, podcast pages, or your top level service pages.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Advertisement
Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting MethodologyUnlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

GET CERTIFIED. Discover the proven plan for effortless, automated email marketing. Click Here

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Registration Pages – Treat these like an “abandoned cart” type of email and get them to take that next step.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

Advertisement

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:

1710795439 568 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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.

Advertisement

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!

Advertisement

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.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

Published

on

What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

Privacy


By Emily Sullivan

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).

Advertisement

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

Advertisement

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

Advertisement

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:

Advertisement
  • 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.

Advertisement
media mix modeling

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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?

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

“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.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

Published

on

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:

  1. It must exist only as an extension of your subject line; it must not try to introduce any new ideas on its own.
  2. 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:

Advertisement
  • 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.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS