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Media plans are a key part of any brand's marketing activities. Today’s marketers are increasingly adopting data-driven marketing practices. But no matter how much data you have, you can only evaluate your media plan's performance after it has been executed... right? Wrong!
Traditionally, creating a media plan began with analysing past marketing activities. Based on the data available, you would select the main objective and then build your plan, incorporating a variety of media channels. After executing the plan, you would hope for the best and, once completed, gather performance insights to inform future plans. But what if you could skip to the best part? What if you could access the relevant insights before executing your plan?
Today, marketers use marketing mix modelling (MMM) to understand how their media channels contribute to business goals. Next-generation MMM solutions go even further. Firstly, they analyse your media investments in greater depth, explaining campaign performance, customer types, sales channels and the products you sell. Secondly, they provide tools to simulate your media plan and forecast business outcomes, helping you optimise investments. These tools also enable you to justify budget decisions and understand the impact of changes to your plan. This allows you to focus on generating value rather than relying on flawed, channel-specific metrics to assess your media.
Predictive marketing is the future of marketing analytics. Many marketers have already embraced marketing forecast tools to elevate their efforts. These tools enable you to predict the performance of your campaigns before running them. Not only that, but you can also identify performance drivers and outliers, fine-tune various factors, and craft the ideal media plan.
Before forecasting the performance of your media plan, you must first define its framework. Start by selecting a specific time period and adding your campaigns. For each campaign, specify the timeline, campaign type (e.g., performance, branding or always-on), and product type (if applicable). Next, define the channel mix for each campaign, along with the budget and media pressure for each channel.
Enhance the accuracy of your forecast by incorporating factors that influence your marketing performance. Marketing outcomes extend beyond your immediate efforts and are affected by external factors like events and market trends. The same media plan may yield different results across brands due to varying business dynamics, such as price gaps or competitor spending. A robust marketing forecast tool should integrate these elements to produce realistic forecasts tailored to your brand.
Predictive marketing is not just about insights; it empowers brands to optimise their efforts and maximise impact. Advanced forecasting tools allow you to create multiple what-if scenarios that anticipate changes in campaigns and budgets. The media plans you design will be actionable, avoiding rigid forecasts. You can continue refining the details until you achieve the ideal scenario. Ultimately, you will select and implement the most effective media plan.
A recent challenge we addressed for a client involved creating multiple scenarios for an additional €500k investment in Q3.
First, we recreated their current media plan using our MediaScenario Planner forecast tool. This immediately provided new insights, as the client was able to generate a business forecast for their proposed media scenario.
Building on historical data and expertise, we identified four likely scenarios:
By simulating these options, the client gained a clear understanding of the potential ROI from each scenario, empowering them to make informed investment decisions.
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Of the four scenarios, Scenario 4 delivered the best results, followed by Scenario 3. Scenario 4 achieved a 30% increase in sales compared to the worst-performing Scenario 1.
We discovered that Campaigns A and B had already reached their saturation levels, meaning that further investment in these campaigns would lead to a very high marginal CPO. Distributing the budget more evenly across all campaigns in Q3 resulted in the best overall performance.
Data-driven media planning is gaining momentum among marketers. Traditional approaches relied on executing media plans and gathering insights afterward. However, new methods such as next-gen MMM and predictive marketing allow marketers to anticipate and optimise campaign performance before execution. These approaches deliver forecasted business outcomes that help optimise investments, enabling brands to maximise their marketing impact, generate more value, and achieve a higher ROI.
This case study illustrates how running multiple scenarios can optimise media plans, potentially driving a 30% increase in sales.
In today’s data-driven world, next-gen MMM represents the future of marketing analytics. Brands adopting this approach will gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Discover how other customers are using Objective Platform to transform valuable insights into measurable results.
