Multi-channel marketing and optimisation

You’ve done the groundwork to create your audience profiles and personas, now you need to build your audiences and execute your campaigns across your chosen channels. Often this is done in silos, with individuals working in a single channel and building a new audience each time. It doesn’t have to be this way, though – Experian has a solution that enables you to build your audience once and use it across multiple channels.

There are many pressures on marketing functions, but one of the top metrics is return on investment (ROI). Many campaigns or channels are selected primarily with this in mind. This is often difficult to measure effectively when multiple channels are being used, however. You can increase efficiency, and thereby improve ROI, by using the same base set of audience selections, building once and deploying multiple times

Your audience is ready, but how do you activate it, and where? You need to deliver your audience to the publisher, often a tricky and time-consuming task regardless of whether it’s a digital audience or a simple file. Happily, it’s possible to speed things up with the right solution. Experian, for example, has a platform with direct connections to most major publishers that can display your audience’s size before you load it.

When working with multiple publishing partners or across borders, one of the most challenging tasks is to achieve consistency in your audience selections. Using a single source of data, such as Experian, you can create the same audiences and use it with the majority of publishers around the globe. Using a common data currency saves time and enables you to be consistent in audience selection and measurement.

It’s unusual for a new campaign to be fully optimised and performant from its inception. It usually takes a couple of iterations or tweaks to create the best possible outcomes. Testing and learning through data management and audience tweaks is made easier, however, with audience profiles in a tool like Experian’s Mosaic or Partner Audiences.

Often campaigns are run with the same pre-configured audience targets – a married couple, earning over £50k who own a car, for instance. These pre-set audiences are not always the best performers. Using specialist data tools, like those from Experian, gives you the ability to understand which data points most closely correlates to your audiences and are likely to be the best predictive indicators of success in your campaigns. 

There are many optimisation tools on the market, but they’re often limited to a single channel, such as search or display. Understanding the factors behind the optimisation can be the key to a successful campaign, but this information isn’t always readily available on these platforms. Using Experian’s data signals and visualisation dashboards can help you to optimise your campaigns at a macro-level to influence your campaigns on a micro-level.  

It’s easy to measure a campaign run in a single channel, but there are often halo effects that are not captured through a single channel’s measurement lens. Analytic experts, like Experian, use specialists campaign measurement techniques that rise above channel-direct attribution, leading to reporting at a macro level, and thereby capturing the full omnichannel impact of your marketing campaigns.

An econometric study provides the most comprehensive insights into your marketing channels’ performance. It measures above- and below-the-line activity and credits all the touchpoints in the marketing journey. This overcomes issues with traditional attribution, such as last-click or last-touch, which can offer a false impression about the effectiveness of a channel. Experian’s econometric modelling is unbiased and independent.

Independent and unbiased campaign measurement services use expert analytic functions to deliver reports on anything from a single campaign in a single channel through to full econometric studies that evaluate the full campaign mix. Experian provides a measurement service like this, which offers frictionless campaign reporting for all sectors, across all channels.