If you want your ad campaign to produce the end result, a sale outcome, it’s best to start at the beginning, a clear targeting strategy.

That is the emerging viewpoint when it comes to the new trend in marketing – outcome-based advertising.

And end has a start

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Peter Sedlarcik of Havas Media Group says brands no longer have to write off the top of the marketing funnel, brand awareness, as an unmeasurable expense.

Thanks to software that can link purchase to initial ad exposure, they can now follow initial ad views all the way through to check-out.

But Sedlarcik says the best results start with clear goals.

“Upfront assessment and prioritisation of audiences and targets is really a big part of the equation in order to ensure that the strategy is on point and is going to most effectively deliver the business outcomes that the brands are looking for,” he says.

Outcomes take center-stage

In the emerging world of outcome-based marketing, traditional ad metrics like media delivery, engagement and viewability are coming to be seen as mere proxies for the true goal of a campaign – business results.

Sedlarcik says those metrics are now starting to get seen as “peripheral” for many brands.

“They’re mostly interested in understanding how that’s all converting to sales and the growth of their business,” he explains.

The quest for sales

Business outcomes are being seen in sharper relief in 2020 as COVID-19 has put many companies at risk. Making money has rarely been as important.

“We had many clients who had to pull their media activity,” says Havas’ Sedlarcik. “They pulled back on those investments.

“As they’ve slowly started to come back into the market, as they started to seek some type of normalcy in terms of the way they’re marketing their brands and connecting with their customers, there’s an increased focus on directly connecting that to outcomes, to sales, to volume growth.”

In-house software

Stitching together all those data points, from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom, is no mean feat.

A plethora of software provider is issuing tools to do so. Sedlarcik’s Havas has made some of its own.

“We’ve created a number of tools and platforms and analytics frameworks that help us tie those things together,” he says:

  • Full funnel metric modelling: “Understanding the connection between media activity, driving those upper funnel brand metrics, how that converts to actual behaviours and market in terms of sales.”
  • Converged analytics engine. “Focused on not only tying back to what we’re delivering in market from a media perspective and reporting on just the delivery metrics but really tying back to sales outcomes.”
  • Converged audience platform: “Really helps us to partner with our clients to understand what their business objectives are, their marketing objectives are, who are their current customers, who are the opportunity segments that they’re looking to connect with in order to grow the business?”

You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page