In today’s business climate, companies must avoid errors at all costs. Embracing data-driven strategies significantly boosts consumer understanding and improves return on investment (ROI). And it helps brands navigate turbulent market conditions and outpace their competitors in recovery.
In our report, From Baseline to Breakthrough: A Guide to Measuring ROI and Improving Brand Health, we explore how brands use market and consumer intelligence to uncover opportunities and gain valuable insights. They can assess overall brand health and enhance ROI using, assuming they have the right data.
And the right data will be crucial as we navigate an online world impacted by Google’s decision to eliminate cookies. To effectively reach audiences, marketers must explore alternative methods to connect with their target audiences.
But let’s start with the basics—namely, the importance, challenge, and benefits of meaningful ROI measurement.
The Importance, Challenge, and Benefits of ROI
Measuring ROI can be complex for businesses as they need to consider numerous factors. Accurately assessing the ROI for marketing initiatives requires attributing results properly, tracking data over time, investing in resources, accessing the right data, and accounting for external factors that may impact outcomes.
And it’s a critical step in understanding where you stand as a business:
- Measuring ROI enables companies to assess marketing efficacy and income generated, informing better decision-making and marketing strategy shifts.
- Assessing ROI helps brands optimize marketing spend by identifying high-performing campaigns or channels and reallocating resources.
- And an ROI assessment justifies marketing expenditures to stakeholders, fostering confidence and trust for future investments in marketing projects.
Measuring ROI supports so much in an organization, including:
- Data-driven decision-making: ROI data empowers brands to optimize marketing, manage expenditures, and identify effective campaigns or channels.
- Improved efficiency: Measuring ROI identifies areas for better performance and achieving goals with fewer resources.
- Improved accountability: Demonstrating a favorable ROI justifies spend and resonates with numbers-driven stakeholders.
- Continuous improvement: Tracking ROI over time enables brands to evaluate progress and optimize product ideation, service offerings, and promotions.
- Competitive advantage: Investing in high-return channels helps companies outperform the competition long-term.
How does one start?
Establishing Brand Health Benchmarks
In our report, we guide brands through setting up initial benchmarks. We break down how that looks, which includes understanding brand perception through metrics like sentiment analysis, brand perception surveys, and social media monitoring to gauge it.
By analyzing data from different sources, brands can quickly visualize the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment linked to various attributes. This creates a baseline for future ROI analysis and one that’s quickly and intuitively accessible to stakeholders.
Which channels should brands capture insight from? That depends . . .
Understanding Channel Data
Social media has become essential to the daily lives of a significant portion of the world’s population. It’s where they seek advice, share experiences, express desires, air grievances, and feel connected to others. Modern brands recognize social media’s potential for consumer insights and use it to:
- Extract data, including feedback and consumer sentiments around existing offerings as well as identify gaps
- Use social media monitoring for crisis management
- Analyze and measure data to inform future campaigns
- Ensure customer service, price, value, and quality are meeting consumer expectations, particularly when measured against a leading competitor
And these channels aren’t just the usual social channels where a brand posts content, news media conversations are also crucial, as are channels where competitors are active. Understanding the overall share of voice across the entire social web, with blogs, forums, and comment data captured web-wide, is necessary for a comprehensive consumer and market landscape view.
Brands use this insight in several ways, including:
- Evaluating and directing brand perception by identifying and engaging with impactful stories
- Recognizing emerging trends impacting
- Identifying influencers, Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), and journalists that are shaping the conversation in your space
For example, in our report, we gauge the share of voice in the autonomous vehicle conversation via a media channel analysis. We can see (below) that Baidu and Lyft have experienced steady growth. Baidu is gaining attention for its investment in AI beyond the vehicle industry, including developing its version of ChatGPT named Ernie Bot.
Understanding these and other stories fueling your industry’s coverage should guide your own media strategy and communications initiatives. And as your brand gains traction in whatever popular media channels apply, you’ll want to ensure that awareness is trending positively and supporting brand health. All exposure isn’t good exposure if it turns potential clients toward your competitors.
In any environment, neglecting brand health is a risk—and today, in our age of instant virality for the wrong things, neglecting brand health can prove fatal. Consumers’ loyalty is less assured. Awareness of these insights can increase revenues, customer acquisition, and overall brand equity. And your investors will appreciate your attention to these important, and too often intangible, metrics.
For a comprehensive guide to measuring ROI and enhancing brand health, we invite you to read our report From Baseline to Breakthrough: A Guide to Measuring ROI and Improving Brand Health. And be sure to reach out for a demo as well and discover how we can help you elevate your brand’s ROI story.