You can increase the performance of your 2008 Geo Targeted media with magnified visibility into their performance by DMA, ZIP and carrier route. If you spend over $2 million on programs such as ValPak, Advo, Circulars, Mailsouth, PennySaver and Direct Mail, pinpoint the markets and media programs that perform best.
Here are 5 reasons why to tighten the focus of your Geo Targeted Media with ongoing DMA Geo analysis in 2008.
Reason 1: Don’t erroneously cut programs that actually work.
Evaluating the performance of a program such as ValPak or Advo as a whole, instead of by the markets within the program, can lead to lost sales in highly performing markets for that program. “Whole-program analysis” can be misleading and often results in cutting programs that provided real value.
If your target Cost Per Sale for a Geo targeted program is around $200, for instance, yet your overall CPS hovers around $500 for six months or more, many marketers would argue that the clear choice would be to cut the program in question. A program analysis at a market level, however, often reveals that a small percentage of underperforming markets are severely impacting the performance of the entire program. Marketers who have faced these scenarios have identified as much 30% of program spend to be re-allocated to highly performing markets within the program. Saving a program, more often than not, leads to increased response and sales at a lower cost, while saving reliable sales performance historically associated to the program.
Reason 2: Shift money away from saturated markets where you may be overspending.
As marketers, we often want to isolate what is working and what is not and perform a look-a-like analysis. In doing so, we may increase our marketing to a particular segment or geographic area without analyzing the number of touches we have made to that market within a channel and across channels. By completing a cross market analysis, companies are able to identify markets where they are overspending in comparison to other markets that are achieving similar success with much smaller marketing budget allocations. Doing this, marketers are able to shift money and marketing to areas where the most impact can be achieved.
Reason 3: Eliminate underperforming markets.
Underperforming markets are the low hanging fruit of marketing optimization. By cutting underperforming markets, that have not performed and are clearly trending in a negative direction, companies can easily eliminate wasteful spend and re-allocate budget to the most productive markets and programs. Identifying these underperforming markets has become increasingly easier. Historical analysis of geo targeted media at the DMA, ZIP, and carrier route levels shows clear trends of seasonality and market area performance that enable marketers to earmark underperforming markets for creative and offer testing or for outright elimination. Geo targeted media vendors can provide historical confirmation reports that can be matched up to sales and response data to shed light on performance over time, and inform immediate and long term buying decisions that prove immediate impact on program performance.
Reason 4: Hit your numbers without increasing your spend.
A series of tweaks to your current marketing activities can squeeze more juice from your geo targeted marketing without increasing your spend. Marketers running DMA geo analysis of a single geo-targeted program are identifying underperforming, hot and overfished markets associated to a single geo targeted program and are able to re-allocate spend within that program to optimize the program itself.
Additionally, marketers running numerous programs can benefit from cross- market cross-program analysis to better understand not only how a particular geo targeted marketing program performs across DMA’s, but also see how each program (NewsAmerica vs. Advo vs. Valpak for instance) compare against one another within those market areas. This cross program analysis enables marketers to target DMA’s appropriately based on response to geo- targeted program types and to re-allocate marketing spend from one program to another based on market level program performance. Add to this the ability to leverage trends analysis to help marketers to recognize how seasonality impacts sales of one program over another and to allocate spend, by season, to those programs that have historically performed best in a market area.
Reason 5: Market Level Analysis just got easier!
Shifting your marketing to a market level is no small task. Allocating responses and sales across 40,000 zip codes and 200 DMAs does require some heavy data processing, data relationships, and sophisticated allocation logic. That’s why Upper Quadrant’s UQube GEO product is the perfect solution for our customers. We’ve taken care of the heavy lifting and best practices that drive award winning market level analysis. We put actionable information in the hands of marketers. Experience market level reporting that is timely, accurate and visually stunning and guaranteed to improve your media performance. We guarantee it!
Who should consider market level analysis?
If you spend $2M or more on geo targeted media annually, and don’t have access to this level of analysis today, you’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity to improve your marketing!