Only 21% Of Brands Are Happy With How They Spend Their Ad Budget. Why? - Episode 241

DESCRIPTION

In today’s podcast, Kiri gives a quick overview of the current state as well as the new model for media allocation that has been developed at Bobsled - allocating by the stage of the marketing funnel that your brand wants to target. After that, you can hear the Q&A portion of last week’s webinar Kiri hosted with Matteo Bizon, where you can hear many interesting and relevant questions as well as practical answers.

Make sure you tune in to find out more!

Matteo is a PPC specialist at Bobsled. He became passionate about digital advertising while studying marketing management at university and immediately started experimenting by launching his own website project and helping a friend start an ecommerce business for his clothing brand. After working for an Italian digital marketing agency, he joined Amazon where he learnt Amazon advertising in a client-facing role. Looking for more challenges and knowledge around advertising on Amazon, Matteo joined Bobsled where he had the opportunity to discover more advanced techniques and refine his skills.

“Looking at media budget through the lens of your brand’s objectives is a forward looking view - it anticipates change.”

— Kiri Masters

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The current methods of budget allocation are not working. We suggest allocating by the stage of the marketing funnel that your brand wants to target. For example, if you’re a brand focused on growing awareness or market share, you’re at the top of the marketing funnel - e.g. DSP, display ads, etc. For more details, check out the resources linked below.
There are two main methods of allocating retail budget right now, anecdotally, according to Kiri’s poles (out of 94 respondents):
- As a percentage of sales per retail channel - 34% of respondents.
- According to ROAS performance - 27% of respondents.
- The remainder either don’t have a consistent methodology, or are using another method.
- Only 21% of respondents are satisfied with how their brand approaches retail media allocation at the moment.
Questions front he Q& A portion of the webinar:
- Do you consider TACoS a useful KPI? - Not in awareness or consideration campaigns.
- Do you automate the application of the insights or do you manually update budgets on a daily basis? - As an agency, we use Pacvue; you need to structure your campaign carefully, set up tags, and Pacvue gives us the possibility to group campaigns, and aggregate the data easily.
- If a brand is focused on growth would you recommend this model to only run awareness or consideration campaigns, or would you still run some purchase and loyalty campaigns just with a smaller budget? - Prioritize awareness and consideration; if something must be sacrificed, it should be purchase rather than brand defense and loyalty.
- How long should each phase last? - no specific time periods, it’s a constant flow; the stage would be changed only if the objective is changed.
- How do you evaluate quality or incrementality of traffic when you’re looking at dividing budgets across the funnel? Just optimizing towards the low CPC is a no go. - We need to base our decisions on the results of each specific metric based on the stage of the funnel: the lowest CPM for awareness, lowest CPC for consideration and ROAS for purchase and loyalty.
Challenges with this approach:
- The size of the company and organizational silos - lack of intelligence sharing, fighting over budgets.
- Inconsistency in reporting based on the platforms, retailers - the report contains a framework that compares these different metrics.
- Brands buy retail media to peak the interest of a buyer at a major retailer, so they need to invest a certain amount.