Do’s And Don’ts For Marketing Measurement During A Pandemic

How can marketing efforts be measured during an outbreak? Since the COVID-19 pandemic toppled everything including the personal and professional lives of people worldwide. The stark question is that should you even try to measure your marketing efforts at such a time. If yes, then where should you start?

The following are the five marketing measurement strategies that you can pause for some time, and five should be continued.

Matched Market Tests:

Stability is needed to compare the activities of users in a single control region with the activities of users in a single test region. Stability is bound to be affected as regions, states, and geographies go in and out of social distancing protocols, with numerous differences in user behavior. Geo-experiments and ROPO (research online, purchase offline) tests are also stopped because of the same reason.

Short-Term Campaign KPIs:

You have to make some hard decisions about your long-term business objectives. If there is still some relevance to your then you might want to change some of your long-term key performance indicators (KPIs) and focus only on short-term KPIs. That is what you don’t have to do. Because the circumstances right now are so rare that you might not hit any of those short-term KPIs. There is a huge possibility that whatever you learn from the success or failure of short-term KPIs won’t work at all in the coming time.

Major Strategic Projects:

Some major transformations are seen in consumer media habits as well as reactions to those shifts. The consumption of online news and linear TV has increased. In the meantime, the demand for streaming services has increased which made YouTube and Netflix, and some others, to lessen the quality of the video so that the bandwidth usage is reduced. Time will tell whether these habits are long-lasting or temporary but this is not the time to learn about media approaches.

Face-To-Face Measurement:

All face-to-face interviews, including exit interviews, market research, and in-person creative testing need to be stopped to ensure the safety of all involved.

Unrealistic Timelines:

If a campaign launch is driven by a business-critical timeline then carry on and don’t worry about that campaign’s optimal measurement. Optimal measurement always involves additional time to plan, calculate, and apply essential arrangements. Make your executives aware that it might not be able to implement the best approach. However, if there is no other way but to go for optimal measurement then ensure you have sufficient time considering the current situation.

Measure Critical Campaigns And Channels:

It is not wise to completely stop measurement. It is important to ensure that you’re investing reliably. Keep arranging the corresponding analytical elements through your strategic measurement stack for key campaigns. Use preflight data checks on your media plans, examine live results to do in-flight optimization, and thorough post-campaign analysis for campaigns with material budgets.

Leverage Remote Creative Pretesting:

During these times, you should know the way your ads are being taken as far as tone is concerned. Your brand image can get badly affected by just a small misstep. Normal pretesting continues to be crucial for new creative and it has been a strong indicator of in-market performance. You can even retest creative that was being used before the COVID-19 outbreak to ensure its effectiveness and relevance.

Focus On Strategic, Cross-Marketing Meta-Analysis:

Analysts usually are caught in the “trees view” of data because businesses move fast. Use this period to increase your efforts to analyze the “forest views” buried in your data sets. Focus on the efficiency of digital channels in offering value through marketing projects and showing cross-channel reason and consequence of numerous strategies that are used.

Take Advantage Of Think Time:

There is plenty of time to think right now since you are pausing many things that you used to do. This could be the best stage for the preparation and advancement of your analytics policies for 2021 and beyond. What would be life post-COVID-19 is unknown. But the practices, guidelines, and guardrails for measurement for the future can be planned.

Invest In Structural Upgrades:

For the past few years, you might be so busy working that you’ve repeatedly postponed essential upgrades. If your large-scale campaign measurement efforts are lessened then it might be the time to begin structural upgrades to your analytical capabilities. You can team up with your agency partners to improve and update reporting and analysis cadences across touchpoints.

This is a tough time for everyone. We can hope this stops soon and doesn’t ever happen again. But it is imperative to deal with the current reality. Marketing is reacting to this ever-shifting landscape as so should measurement strategies.