Why You Need a Marketing Feedback Loop
How do some brands continuously produce one effective campaign after another? What do they know that others don’t? These brands don’t necessarily have a ‘secret sauce’. Many have a marketing feedback loop that constantly gives them feedback about what is and isn’t working.
Have you heard of a feedback loop before? Feedback loops exist all around us, in biology, engineering, economics, and even business. They provide corrections when systems or processes are running off course.
Why are feedback loops important in marketing?
A marketing feedback loop involves analysing results and using the insights to guide your future decisions. It helps you to understand the cause and effect of different elements of your marketing mix. So, if you aren’t hitting your targets, then you have an idea of what levers you should pull to get back on track.
If you are using a marketing feedback loop, every time you take an action, you will measure and observe the results over a period of time, then use those insights to guide your future actions.
That’s why some brands are so effective in everything that they do. They constantly keep track of important marketing metrics, such as cost-per-acquisition, customer lifetime value, share of voice, and engagement rates in order to understand whether or not their strategy is achieving the desired objective.
They make small adjustments all of the time and become more confident in every decision that they make because they are constantly gathering and actioning learnings.
Given that we’re able to capture so much data today, there is a lot of potential for marketers to get better at engaging the right audiences, in the right ways, to achieve the right business goals.
Here are three different marketing feedback loops you can start implementing in your digital marketing campaigns today:
Creative Optimisation
Audience Targeting
Website experience
Creative Optimisation
Did you know that creative provides a 47% sales contribution to advertising when compared with other elements, such as targeting, context, brand, and reach? That means it’s one of the most impactful levers that brands can pull when they want to improve their campaigns.
So, how do you work out what ad creative appeals to your target market? It’s important that you experiment with different types of ad creative, for different audience segments, at every stage in the customer journey.
Rather than using one set of creative for a broad audience, set up different campaigns for different audiences and split test your ads within each. Over time, you can tease out high and low-performing ads, then optimise your campaigns based on what you can see is working.
You can also provide the insights back to your creative team so that they know what type of content to capture on their next shoot.
Audience Targeting
It’s important that you understand how different types of people engage with your brand. These days, you can segment your audiences in so many ways, slicing and dicing your data to get a better understanding of niche groups of people.
For example, you might find out that older customers who shop infrequently, in-store are actually your biggest spenders. With that insight, you could consider a loyalty campaign that will encourage them to shop more frequently.
When you create micro-segments, you can start learning about what types of campaigns work for different people. So, don’t just look at top-level platform metrics. Go deeper into your audience and demographic reports to learn about who is engaging with what. Then, you can work your brand into the right markets, more effectively.
Website Experience
Your website sits at the heart of just about every digital campaign that you run. It’s the place where you want your customers to take action, whether that’s purchasing a product or filling out an enquiry form.
That’s why you should always be tracking how people are interacting with your website. What percentage of website visitors are converting? How many people leave your website straight away?
By using tools such as Google Analytics, you can get a good idea of how people are behaving on your website. Then you can determine what changes to make to improve their experience and increase website conversions.
Drowning out the noise.
You are most likely running campaigns across multiple channels. Every digital marketing platform provides its own insights, but when you compare them you get conflicting results. That’s because each platform uses its own attribution model and claiming wins can attract more advertising dollars.
However, your customers will have most likely interacted with your brand on multiple channels. So, it’s difficult to figure out which ones have played the biggest role in driving a conversion.
It’s also easy to get focused on marketing metrics that aren’t related to business outcomes. You could be really excited about improving your reach, but if your cost to acquire customers is greater than their lifetime value, then your marketing strategy isn’t profitable.
That’s why it’s important to give yourself visibility and tune into the right signals. At Status Agency, we use marketing dashboards to give our clients clear visibility over our combined impact. In other words, how are we influencing business outcomes and to what degree? What tactical adjustments do we need to make?
If you want to learn more about our reporting capabilities, then get in touch with our innovative team.