Multichannel Marketers See ROI Measurement as Top Challenge

As highlighted recently in a MediaPost Real-Time Daily post, quantifying and optimizing ROI across channels is a top challenge for today’s marketing execs.  Gone are the days when direct marketers could afford siloed channel strategies, and AccuList USA’s multichannel campaign services, supporting integrated solutions across channels, are just one way we have evolved to meet demand.

The Challenge of Multichannel ROI

Citing a new global survey conducted by the programmatic marketing and analytics firm DataXu, the Real-Time Daily article notes that U.S. senior marketers now say the single greatest challenge in their jobs is developing an accurate way to quantify ROI across the variety of channels. Another 37% of U.S. marketers say their biggest challenge is developing an efficient marketing mix across channels to drive ROI. The U.S. marketers are not alone, however; difficulty tracking the success of a marketing campaign into metrics was cited by one-third of global marketers as the largest threat to the success of their teams.

Higher Bar for Digital Skills and Data Literacy

In meeting multichannel challenges, marketers also feel the bar for technical skills is set higher than ever before because of expanding digital technologies and proliferating data sources. So it’s no surprise that 78% of U.S. marketers point to understanding marketing technologies as a skill critical to their mission, and 72% think grasping digital media is crucial to success. Overall,  65% also say it is necessary to be data literate.

Testing Into the Right Channel Mix

Testing to optimize marketing mix ROI is an approach that some marketers are now taking, per the article, including survey author DataXu. These marketing teams are randomizing deployment of existing budgets across various channels and then measuring business outcomes to pinpoint where a campaign is most successful, transforming a media plan into a controlled experiment.  “This methodology identifies the causal link between media investments and business outcomes — sales or brick-and-mortar foot traffic,” Gar Smyth, VP of marketing at DataXu, explained to Real-Time Daily.

For the article and its statistics, go to http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/280801/marketers-biggest-challenge-is-quantifying-roi.html