How to maximize marketing dollars, even in a downturn

Marketers have always had to work on a tight budget. And in recent years, even before the novel coronavirus came along and turned the world upside down, they were getting tighter. To wit: Findings from Gartner’s most recent CMO Spend Survey, released last October, revealed that marketing budgets dropped below 11% of company revenue for the first time since 2014.

With the COVID-19 crisis, every marketing dollar is being scrutinized even more. And some companies are going one drastic step further by slashing their marketing budgets. Google, for instance, is cutting its budget by as much as half.

For some organizations that have done their homework, that kind of approach might be necessary. But for others? Maybe not. And here’s why: Lots of times, companies just don’t know how to generate returns efficiently. And the reason is simple: They don’t have the insight they need in order to properly size up the situation.

With the right technology, however, gaining that insight is not only possible, it’s painless. And data science plays a big role in that equation.

Indeed, with good data-science support, marketers can make smart decisions based on real-time data. No more guessing as to what’s working and what isn’t. No more wondering if money is being spent in the right places.

Take, for example, digital marketing. There’s no doubt that lots of people are online right now. But do you know if the dollars you are putting toward Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads are divvied up in the optimum fashion?

As the mock example directly below illustrates, ad spend can plateau at different points on different platforms. When there’s a plateau, ROI comes to a halt, because a saturation point has been reached with that particular target market.

With audience variables constantly changing—from the amount of people looking at an ad to the composition of those people (and even their emotional state at the time of consumption)—it’s important to get up-to-date and accurate signals as to what channels or campaigns are performing best so resources can be shifted accordingly, quickly.

That’s where data science can really help marketers. With data science, an automated system can be created to identify—and even react to—inefficiencies in marketing spend. So if returns on, say, Instagram spend begin to plateau, and you have a data-science solution capable of dispatching alerts when it happens, you’ll know exactly when and how to shift your attention to a channel that will yield a return.

Some companies opt to “vulcanize their own rubber” when it comes to data science. That means they have the money and patience to invest in their own data-science program, and they have the resources to build and manage all of their software and infrastructure from scratch.

But for the majority of businesses, the smarter play is to partner with a vendor like Domo. With Domo, customers get access to the most powerful data-science tools they need to address their business problems—and don’t have to worry about the headaches that come with managing data-science infrastructure.

There’s even an option to learn the art of data science while Domo’s professional services team is not only handling data-science projects for you, but delivering value on those projects in record time.

For marketers, that’s huge. Since Domo is a complete platform, it tackles everything from the proverbial first mile (getting your data extracted, transformed and loaded) to the last mile (making that data available and usable to the masses, on any device, through easy-to-consume dashboards and apps).

In other words, anything—from dynamically managing a budget to automating your whole ad-purchasing process—is possible, no matter what kind of business environment you find yourself in.

To learn more about Domo and how organizations are using The Business Cloud’s data science capabilities to better equip their marketing divisions, click here.