Media mix optimization (MMO) is a dynamic approach to quantitative marketing measurement, planning and campaign enhancement across a range of media used to engage consumers. The goal of MMO is to maximize media effectiveness and consumer engagement throughout the sales cycle, while also aiming to optimize the marketing spend related to that media.
What is Modern Marketing?
Modern marketing aims to enhance the customer experience by creating holistic marketing campaigns that engage consumers at every touchpoint within the buyer journey. In today’s rapidly changing marketing landscape, marketers must be able to adapt to emerging digital marketing technologies in order to meet mounting consumer demands for a personalized shopping experience.
For today’s marketers, media mix optimization is a crucial tool for meeting the demands of the modern, research-driven and digitally savvy consumer. But what goes into media mix optimization and how can marketers develop their own MMO strategies?
The Importance of Media Mix Optimization in Today’s Modern Marketing Landscape
In the past, it was acceptable to provide generic, non-targeted messages across a broad media landscape. Those days are long gone. Modern consumers demand hyper-targeted, personalized marketing engagements across the channels and touchpoints they use the most.
With this in mind, media mix optimization helps marketers understand and apply the four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion) into their campaign efforts. From there, they can identify how each of the Ps can be aligned to maximize the impact of marketing efforts along the customer journey. This allows marketers to place the right message on the right channel, then place those messages in front of the right consumer at the right time, providing maximized engagement and marketing ROI.
3 Elements Needed for Effective Media Mix Optimization
The complexity of today’s marketing landscape combined with expanding consumer demands means that marketing success -- or failure -- hinges on the ability to optimize the media mix used to generate ROI. Let’s explore three distinct elements of a media mix strategy that deliver the most dynamic insights and optimized efforts:
1. Accurate Marketing Analytics
The media mix today consists of multiple touchpoints across a variety of online and offline channels. What’s more, consumers all have individual media engagement habits—meaning the engagement patterns of one consumer will not reflect the patterns of another. To ensure that the media mix is optimized at the person-level, data that accurately illustrates where, when and how to engage consumers is absolutely crucial.
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Granular Attribution Data: For MMO, marketers need a clear understanding of the touchpoints and channels that are successfully driving consumers down the sales funnel. This data highlights what is driving the most ROI for their marketing spend. These insights should be focused on granular measurements that can showcase engagements down to the person level.
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Aggregate Data: Understanding the long-term trends and external factors that influence whether campaign will successfully reach consumers at the right time is key to providing an optimal experience across the buyer journey. Achieving this means gathering aggregate data such as the peak times for consumer engagement during a specific quarter.
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Creative Messaging and Brand Impact Data: Understanding the impact of brand authority and its potential for driving conversions gives marketers better insights into opportunities for campaign optimization. Additionally, marketers should include data on their creative messaging, which can help indicate when and on which channels certain creative performs best.
2. Accurate Marketing Measurement and Optimization Methods
Without accurate measurement methods and strategies, marketers run the risk of optimizing their campaigns in the wrong places—resulting in decreased marketing impact and wasted spend. No marketer wants that. That’s why forward-thinking marketing teams are increasingly relying on models that facilitate successful media mix optimization, by incorporating:
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Omnichannel Attribution: To generate the granular attribution data needed for media mix optimization, marketers should consolidate their existing attribution efforts into an integrated omnichannel strategy. With these capabilities, marketers can generate person-level insights, breaking down consumer engagement by time, touchpoint, channel and more.
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Marketing Mix Models: In order to gather the long-term, aggregate data capable of shedding light on the external trends that impact marketing efforts, it’s crucial that marketing mix modeling be incorporated into media mix optimization efforts. This allows marketers to see where marketing spend is best applied, as well as where and when certain campaigns have the best chances to generate ROI.
3. Marketing Measurement Platform Capable of Unified Measurement
Today, marketers are spoiled for choice when it comes to the quantity of available analytics platforms. Indeed the market is saturated with services and vendors claiming to offer the latest and greatest platform for marketing success. However, the quality choices are far more limited. For true media mix optimization, a marketing performance measurement platform capable of collecting the right data from across the marketing mix is the only real solution -- one that develops models to make sense of that data and distill it down to actionable insights.
Final Thoughts
Media mix optimization is a critical step toward maximizing marketing ROI and engaging consumers at every touchpoint. To meet consumer demand for relevancy and fluid engagements, marketers need to ensure that their MMO efforts are accurately, efficiently generating the unified, person-level insights that drive true campaign optimization.
