With traders under extreme pressure to meet revenue goals, marketing efforts at the top of the funnel took a back seat. Yet the need to raise awareness has never been greater for brands, as consumers have better access and choice and less exposure to logos on shelves and shop windows. Nielsen’s latest report argues for adopting a balanced marketing strategy that combines the right message and the right mix of channels to create long-term growth.
The sales impact of low-funnel marketing strategies materializes faster, but Nielsen’s analysis suggests that brand-building efforts are leverage to drive sales. By measuring the effectiveness of a financial services firm’s marketing efforts in generating sales in approximately 20 markets, Nielsen found that the correlation between top funnel brand metrics and marketing effectiveness was significantly strong ( 0.73). Building brand equity therefore not only benefits direct sales, but also improves the efficiency of your activation efforts.
Marketing represents 10 to 35% of a brand’s equity, according to Nielsen. Since fairness also comes from visibility, taking non-commercial sources of fairness, such as regular use of a product and seeing a product on the shelf, for granted is a mistake. On the one hand, fewer shoppers go to stores, thus eliminating the risk of them seeing logos. Additionally, consumers have access to an endless selection of brands online, making it difficult for individual brands to stand out. Finally, supply disruptions linked to COVID-19 have affected product availability, forcing consumers to try alternatives.
This last point is highlighted by the differences in brand and trial retention rates between traditional and digital channels. For example, data from Nielsen Commspoint revealed that in the U.S. consumer packaged goods market, shoppers report that 4.3% of their physical purchases are for a brand they had never purchased before. For online purchases, this figure rises to 12.2%. This metric goes from 83% of physical GIC purchases to 72% of online GIC purchases.
Nielsen cautions against assuming that you can directly apply referrals around the best-suited channel to build your brand’s equity. The effectiveness of channels from campaign to campaign can be very diverse, as Nielsen found when measuring the impact of message marketing strategy for an electronics brand and a car brand in the short and long. term. Top-of-the-funnel auto brand messages were 5% less effective than all media at generating short-term sales and 18% more effective than all media at generating long-term sales. To deploy the most effective messaging and measure your share of voice within each messaging strategy, brands can reduce their competitive ad data through creations in the top and bottom funnels.
Looking at the same comparison through the lens of specific channels, Nielsen found that with top-of-the-funnel messaging, video and offline media are very effective in driving short- and long-term sales. With lower funnel messaging, non-video and online media are more effective at generating short-term sales than they are at generating long-term sales.
If single-lens optimization were a viable option, Nielsen notes, there wouldn’t be a case where brands like Gap and TripAdvisor admit to having made mistakes in abandoning branding in the name of an accent. increased on activation.
To optimize both short and long term goals, brands should consider optimizing their marketing mix for total sales if they have already measured short and long term ROI. If a brand doesn’t have the full impact on sales, marketers can perform sequential optimization and then weigh those stimulus results together to create a hybrid plan and set goals for what that plan will achieve.
According to 2013 research from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, long-term efforts are real long-term business drivers. The company suggests that the optimal balance between long-term and short-term effort is 60-40.
The bottom line: Marketers need to determine what the minimum short-term business requirements are and whether their business has the flexibility to expect longer-term results.