Your organization’s ability to drive above-market growth hinges on two areas:
- The quality of data-driven insights provided by your marketing analytics
- Your team’s ability to translate those insights into actionable optimizations
To help our clients achieve this level of performance from their media, we apply our Active Media Management methodology.
Here’s what active media management means and how it works.
What is Active Media Management?
Active media management means your campaign is being continuously monitored, reviewed and optimized by a human to ensure it is operating at peak performance. We’re talking about hands-on management to reallocate budget, update bids, adjust targeting and tweak creative assets, just to name a few, across the entire media channel mix.
To facilitate active media management, our media buyers know how to interpret and apply a vast amount of data. Like strategic marketers seeking a key insight or digging for a trend to leverage, the answers that allow media buyers to maximize campaign effectiveness are deep in the data. And that data still requires a human to be interpreted efficiently and effectively because marketing and customer data frequently are not unified.
How Active Media Management Drives Quality Insights & Optimizations
Active Media Management helps to unify marketing and customer data.
Organizations are swimming in vast amounts of data, but it is commonly contained in disconnected silos that don’t talk to each other. Many companies have their digital marketing data and analytics in a central repository, but customer data is disconnected and managed in a different system. This gap creates a challenge in studying the relationships that live in the data, the business insights that can be identified and the data story that could change how you think about the messaging and creative for a campaign.
Unifying marketing and customer data requires ongoing, active collaboration and analysis among your data analysts, media managers and strategists. Within an active media management approach, we are working together throughout the course of the campaign against a strategic measurement and reporting plan that measures what matters in an easy and clear data story for your team. This, combined with an extended suite of tools, enables the team to build unified views into the data and capture the broader impact of the campaign across the business. Our “always-on” level of collaboration maximizes your overall campaign effectiveness and provides an incredible level of holistic insights back into your business strategy.
It’s true that the optimizations are automated by algorithmic prediction models and machine learning; however, humans are still required to make sure the machines are pointing in the right direction and interpreting those insights on a deeper level. The better the data is that’s going in, the stronger the results in the end.
Active Media Management empowers teams to make informed decisions — faster.
When you want to make data-informed decisions faster, you need to move beyond seeing your analytics as a quick stats exercise and go to the next level of marketing analytics. Focus and discipline must be applied to the data that’s captured, the way reporting is provided and in turn how this is applied back to decisions. This next level is about using data to tell a story and bringing that to life for the organization visually. Visuals make the interpretation of the data clearer, so your team can take action faster.
Building clear and actionable data stories requires (you guessed it) up-front collaboration among analysts, media managers and strategists to understand what really matters to your organization’s goals, challenges and opportunities. This naturally occurs during our active media management methodology. The outcome will be informed teams armed with data visualizations, dashboards and insights that present a narrative that is clear and actionable.
Here are a few examples of the types of adjustments and “always-on” thinking that happen during active media management:
- Deeper-level creative feedback that helps creative teams adjust between campaign flights
- ROAS reporting by channel that helps paid media strategists reallocate media dollars to more efficient channels
- Website behavior analysis that reveals the need for driving improvements in your customer experience
Getting Started
Using an Active Media Management approach enables us not only to analyze and improve campaign performance, but also simultaneously to provide teams with higher-level insights and results reporting to feed back into the business strategy. This high level of holistic thinking and real-time collaboration will put your organization on the path to above-market growth.
Does your brand need better results from your paid media campaigns? Talk to our paid media experts. Drop us a line at [email protected].
