A new report from Beckon analyzed marketing performance across many of the world’s top brands, focusing on opportunities and recommendations for marketers. Included among the topics studied were: Content creation, non-working media spend, programmatic ad buying, and the business benefit of agility.
Surprisingly, one of the main revelations from the report revolves around brand content and customer engagement.
Consider the following statistics: Brand-generated content volume rose 300% year-over-year, but total engagement by consumers with content is flat. What’s more, just 5% of branded content garners 90% of total consumer engagement.
A 2015 Loyalty360 article reports that only meaningful content will drive brand loyalty among millennials.
In Beckon’s report, it analyzed more than $16 billion in omnichannel marketing spend and performance data, current “hot” areas of marketing investment, and actual spend and performance data from hundreds of brands to reveal whether those investments are actually working.
According to the report, the results are fairly surprising: Some tactics are clearly performing well, but only utilized by a small number of brands. Other tactics are widespread among brands, but the performance data shows little to no payoff.
Based on Beckon's marketing performance analysis, third-party research, and case studies from customers, the report makes recommendations to help data-driven marketers set benchmarks for success and chart a better course for action.
Here are some other key findings from the report:
Non-working media spend is increased 50% while working media growth rates are only up 7%.
Programmatic ad buying is delivering 2x better ROI than media bought in traditional ways, but only half of digital marketing is traded programmatically.
Brands that are investing in rapid measurement and spend optimization experience a 12.7% lift in MROI and a 1% higher profit.
“At Beckon, we ensure that every one of our customers has access to accurate, complete, and validated data that they can track against and trend,” said Beckon CEO Jennifer Zeszut. “From good, trusted data flow good, trusted decisions. We are a rock-solid source of truth for brands, and we also want to be that for the industry. Most surveys and studies reflect on what marketers are doing. We are excited to report on what’s working—because marketing is no longer judged by how much it does, but how well it performs and the impact it makes on the business.”
The Beckon data sample analyzed in the report comprises the marketing spend and performance data for 203 brands, representing more than $16 billion in marketing investment across 120 countries. The dataset includes all channels of marketing—earned, owned and paid media—as well as business outcome (sales) data and brand equity data, which was aggregated and anonymized for the report to ensure the privacy of Beckon customers. Findings are based on data captured from Sept. 1, 2014, to Aug. 31, 2016.