When it comes to the ad budget how much could be spent on creativity if you’d eliminated wasted spend?

You can save money on your projects without sacrificing creativity if you follow a few vital steps – including making sure you’re receiving accurate data in your marketing analytics and using a complete ad fraud protection option like Veracity.

Start with the basics

You need to create a clear design brief so you know what your objectives are and what the overall mission, audience and tone of the campaign will be.

Then include the deliverables you want included in the creativity brief – logos, photos, custom typography if necessary, branding guidelines. Be clear what should be included and what’s already available.

If you have them, use visual references too. This can help cut down repeated revisions, which cost you money and add to the campaign timeframe. Give your designer the tools they need to get it right on the first (or second) try.

The most important thing is that all your branding elements – social media assets (photos, infographics, illustrations), logos, typefaces – remain cohesive and consistent. It’s about quality over quantity. 

Better planning usually results in a lower budget. 

Advertise where your customers are

Make sure you’re spending money on platforms where you know you have an audience.

Research and use buyer personas to find out who – and where – your typical customers are. Find answers for the following questions: 

• What other brands do they follow in your industry? 
• What kind of content gets the most likes and engagement? 
• Which types of content inspires conversation?

Once you know where your customers, and potential new clients, are, you can create the content that fits those platforms and which answers their needs. Design for the key platforms, rather than investing in generic content.

Make sure sales and marketing are aligned

Historically, sales and marketing teams have worked in a silo and developed independently. This means teams sit in different offices, use different technologies and have different goals.

However, according to Marketo and Reachforce, businesses with aligned marketing and sales teams are up to 67% more efficient at closing deals.

Organisations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams see 27% profit growth, and 36% higher customer retention. What’s more, 56% of these companies also met revenue goals and 19% exceeded them.

This also ties in with research from MarketingSherpa, that found 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales, however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified (aka in the ‘right time’ window). 

With Gartner also reporting that up to 70% of sales leads are not properly leveraged or are completely ignored, ending up wasting marketing ad spend, this can lead to sacrificing creativity in the face of reduced budgets.

The best way to align sales and marketing is to have them striving for the same overall goal. Of course, they might have different personal KPIs or team KPIs, but ultimately they should all work together to drive new customers, not new leads.

Accurate data is a vital component for creativity

Inaccurate marketing data is detrimental to how campaign performance is measured and what actions are taken.

Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Data and Analytics Survey showed that only 54% of marketing decisions are being influenced by marketing analytics. The research also pointed to poor quality data as the #1 reason for uninformed marketing decisions. 

Gartner’s survey found the top impediments for hindering analytics teams’ successes were:

1. Manual Data Preparation/Pulls Take Too Much Time;
2. Inability to Connect Data and Analytics to Business Value;
3. Inability to Connect Analysis to Insight.

And, according to the company’s 2022 Marketing Technology Survey, marketers are utilising just 42% of their martech stack capabilities today, as compared to 58% in 2020.

This is a worrying trend when respondents are citing poor data quality, unactionable results and nebulous recommendations as top reasons for why they don’t rely on analytics to make decisions.

Business-led marketing technology blazed a trail by offering improved efficiency, unlocking new customer experiences and driving customer and business outcomes. Yet the process change and staff training that are also critical to improving marketing technology adoption typically receive little attention.

Save money for creativity by deploying Veracity

Veracity is an award-winning technology platform recognised in the industry as a champion for transparent and accurate marketing data you can trust.

The Veracity platform was born from our previous role as a digital marketing agency when it became clear to us that there were two pressing issues on the rise – ad fraud and a lack of transparency in data analytics.

With its smart ‘human visitors’ technology, Veracity identifies human visitors and non-human visitors and reports on this at channel and campaign level.

With transparency on bot clicks and real human visitors, Veracity gives marketers accurate data on which to base decision-making, enabling a higher return on ad spend.

As digital ad spend continues to grow, it’s even more vital to understand campaign performance at channel, campaign and ad level with transparency around how many bots are clicking your ads and therefore wasting precious marketing budget.

Veracity empowers CMOs and CFOs to improve their digital marketing performance based on accurate independent, unbiased data and insights, allowing them to reduce waste, reduce fraud, get better results and increase their digital Return On Investment (ROI).

See what Veracity can do for you or the brands you represent by watching a four minute demo video.

 

18th Mar 2024