Have you ever actually optimized a marketing campaign in real time? Chances are you haven’t. And you’re not alone. Even the most advanced marketers have taken only relatively rudimentary approaches to real-time campaign optimization.
Where are they falling short? Whether they’re trying to personalize their messaging or go a step further and optimize budget allocations while their campaigns are running, marketers often lack actionable data and insights.
Marketers also need the ability to attribute both online and offline sales to individual tactics—channel, audience segment, ad creative, publisher placement and device type, for instance—to determine the ROI contribution of each. At the same time, they need to use this data to sequence their messages and control their frequency centrally to guide consumers through the purchase process.
Simply put, you need clear insights into ongoing marketing performance and changes in the ways people are behaving to be able to able to optimize your messages.
Integrating data, AI and analytics
Great in theory, but does it work in the real world? Absolutely.
A major global CPG firm recently saw a 12X ROI and millions of dollars in incremental sales as a direct result of working with Nielsen. The omnichannel campaign integrated Nielsen data, technology, artificial intelligence and analytics in ways that are only available through Nielsen Marketing Cloud.
The first step was to build an audience strategy identifying all types of shoppers for the company’s product line—from lapsed buyers to competitive buyers. First-party CRM data was integrated with Nielsen audience data. This included data from Nielsen Catalina, the only source for UPC-level data for more than 121,000 brands and 140 million individuals. Ultimately, the goal was to gain a richer understanding of the shopper journey with an eye on identifying who would be most likely to buy next.
The Nielsen Marketing Cloud DMP then unified and segmented the audience data. Nielsen AI looked at 6 months of purchase history and, incorporating thousands of combinations of customer characteristics, predicted which audiences would buy the brand’s products next.
Finally, Nielsen Marketing Cloud’s Multi-Touch Attribution application analyzed the ROI contribution of every tactic employed over the life of the campaign. It broke it down by audience segment, type of media, creative message and placement, and then used actual price data to accurately predict ROI.
A real-time feedback loop
These attribution insights were continually ingested back into the Nielsen Marketing Cloud. Nielsen AI used this real-time data stream to automatically optimize the CPG company’s audience targeting strategy based on the changing composition of actual buyers. This feedback loop ensured that the campaign was able to continually learn from its successes, maximizing the impact of messaging that worked. The brand ultimately was able to attribute $2.5 million in incremental sales directly to the optimizations enabled by Nielsen Marketing Cloud.
Real-time optimization doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. Brands can gain new insights into their customers and use real-time feedback to guide them through the purchase journey. The end result: a seamless customer journey enabling real results.
