More impact, smaller budgets: 6 ways marketers can spend smarter and save

With economic uncertainty top of mind for businesses and consumers alike, the pressure is on marketers to find new approaches.

Organizations are tightening their belts, leading to smaller budgets, while still expecting marketing departments to deliver. That’s where smart spending, creativity and data-driven decisions will lead to better outcomes for marketing teams.

Economic downturns do not last forever, meaning marketing should remain persistent to keep brands top of mind among consumers. But doing so with reduced resources can be challenging. Here are 6 tips for smart ad spend optimization.

Tip #1. Data unification

Data privacy restrictions continue to pose a challenge for marketers looking to collect, analyze and use customer data. Today, marketers must increasingly rely on first-party data to gain information about their customers.

The challenge can be that data comes from various sources and multiple channels, from website forms to transaction information to in-person engagements. That information may be stored in multiple profiles in various databases.

Marketing and IT teams need to work together to unify data to make it the most actionable and effective for marketing campaigns. Your data will be more valuable, more usable and more accurate with tools that unify and connect.

Lytics Conductor is a powerful solution that allows you to connect and manage your data across platforms and sources. With Lytics Conductor, you can connect data sources using pre-built schema, manage identities with customizable rules and create unified profiles using resolved identities across sources.

Empower your data with unified, de-duplicated, compliant and trusted profiles available in real time. You’ll have confidence that data is clean, actionable and reliable when needed.

Tip #2. Smart segmentation

With smaller budgets, the need for smart segmentation is crucial. You want your tailored campaigns to be delivered to the most relevant audiences with the interests, behaviors and personal characteristics that are a best match.

With Lytics Cloud Connect, you can segment with ease. You’ll develop campaign targets that are relevant and resonant each time.

Lytics Cloud Connect lets you:

• Build highly segmented audiences to deliver personalized marketing messages based on user profiles and past behaviors
• Suppress audiences that will not be receptive to your message. Fine-tuning your audience lets you lower your overall ad spend and the cost of customer acquisition
• Synchronize your data warehouse with hundreds of connections, from social media apps to email delivery systems to analytics platforms
• Work with top data warehouse platforms, including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure and Snowflake.

Tip #3. Behavioral personalization

Personalized marketing experiences are proven to provide better response rates and improve sales. Use the Lytics Decision Engine to gain deeper and more actionable customer insights.

Lytics Decision Engine uses AI to analyze customer interactions and identify behavioral clues and affinities. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of your customers and build stronger connections.

These insights can be used to develop highly personalized messages at scale and in real time. Lytics Decision Engine goes far beyond simple demographic information to help target messages to audiences that will be most receptive.

You can use Lytics Decision Engine to:

• Use predictive insights to boost retention
• Gain content recommendations based on user affinities
• Segment based on interests and behavior
• Integrate customizable audience reports with campaign, content and lookalike modeling reports

Tip #4. Have the right metrics in place

Measurements matter, especially when needing to make hard decisions about marketing spend.

Having meaningful metrics in place allow you to spend smarter. Here are some of the core metrics to have in place to gauge performance and impact.

• Behavior. Be sure to track average order value, which products are the most popular and the return customer frequency rates. All of these indicators can help shape future campaigns that maximize revenue
• Perception and Relevance. Increasingly, brands are looking at relevance as a key indicator. Understanding how aware customers are of your brand, how they view it and whether you are relevant are important indicators to shape messaging campaigns. Interactions on social, with customer service and via surveys and reviews can give you a better indication of brand perception
• Conversion. How many of your leads are converting to customers? Can you measure those numbers by channel and campaign? Be sure to measure not only landing page activity but also activity from targeted campaign page links, page views and bounce rates. Social media conversions are another key approach to help fine-tune priorities
• Acquisition Costs. The cost of customer acquisition is a reliable indicator of the ROI of digital marketing efforts and can be used to justify additional resources and the value of marketing investments

Tip #5. Targeted campaigns

Targeted campaigns are at the very heart of digital marketing today. The key is to have the right tools that make those targets more valuable and more impactful.

By understanding your customers, you’ll be better able to target campaigns to their interests, needs and pain points. However, to best understand those customers, you need accurate and reliable data. Lytics helps you collect and use first-party data to build the best targeted campaigns. It allows you to build campaigns based on specific interests using behavioral algorithms that score your audience across channels.

You’ll invest in customers that are most likely to respond to your message. You can also suppress users from paid campaigns in real time to reduce your spend.

With Lytics, you’ll be able to broaden your reach across platforms, including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and more.

Tip #6. Focus on performance

You need solutions that can be deployed quickly and reliably. Most customer data platform (CDP) implementations take 6-12 months before there is any demonstrable gained value. The Lytics CDP is different. Lytics delivers results within a 30-day evaluation period, showing you value immediately during a trial engagement.

Why try Lytics?

Lytics CDP solutions make an impact across your marketing department. It adds value at a time when smart spending decisions are more critical than ever. With Lytics, you’ll see increased email open rates and better conversion rates. Eliminate data silos, leverage first-party data and build unified customer profiles with lots of details. You’ll build more relevant segments for your campaigns with Lytics CDP and get results that have an impact.

Obstacle to Opportunity: The data-driven marketer’s guide to navigating a recession

To dive even deeper, check out the final part in our Obstacle to Opportunity blog series, Concerned about an economic downturn? Kick off a trial with Lytics for 30-day time to value.