Conventional thinking suggests that driving brand awareness through organic content on one platform allows us to execute down the funnel with paid media on the same platform. However, this separation is often maintained by brands working in silos, impacting how they interact with their audience. On average, the NextGen consumer spends 3.5 hours a day across six social media platforms, creating a web of engagement with brands' organic and paid content as they go.
In terms of measurement, legacy click-based attribution metrics that brands have historically used to evaluate their growth levers struggle to understand this complex network of organic and paid interactions for two key reasons:
Firstly, click-based metrics are fundamentally flawed when the engagement of value is less defined, as is the case with organic activity. Measuring this way would grossly undervalue the impact organic content has on the NextGen audience journey—of which 80% say brand familiarity makes them more likely to buy—and grossly overvalue those at the end of the touchpoint journey, thus misaligning our focus moving forward.
Secondly, traditional attribution approaches struggle with the transitive nature of the modern audience. Engagement across platforms and content types, often in a short timeframe, leads to conversion at a future date, making it notoriously difficult to track and understand when dealing with multiple black box environments simultaneously.
To truly understand the new interconnected audience, a full-funnel attribution model that utilises probabilistic methodologies is required. But that’s not enough—brands also need to ensure that their approach is structured to account for and value cross-content and platform interactions.
At Charlie Oscar, we’ve utilised our attribution model, COmpass, to help brands better engage with today’s audiences—by first understanding them and correctly valuing the touchpoints they have an affinity for.
A leading energy drinks brand faced stagnating DTC growth and became overly reliant on paid investments for Amazon sales, impacting profitability. As the competitive landscape changed, the brand recognised the need to regain its momentum.
COmpass helped the brand identify the paid, owned, and earned drivers of user acquisition, revealing the true incrementality of each marketing activation. While a large majority of Amazon sales navigated through Amazon promoted campaigns, only 30% of these sales were incremental, with 45% of sales being driven by underlying demand generated on paid social, influencer and PR activations. The brand were able to reduce spending in Amazon paid campaigns and reinvest these savings into upper funnel demand generation channels, to generate 3x stronger omnichannel ROAS (generating growth across DTC, Amazon and Retailer sales)
This insight highlighted the cannibalisation between DTC and Amazon sales, enabling the brand to focus on full-funnel growth. Additionally, COmpass clarified the incrementality of product launch sales and their effect on paid marketing channels, allowing the brand to optimise launch cycles for maximum impact while maintaining strong incrementality.
What can you do right now:
You can read the full playbook here and if you want to learn more about how to measure and attribute ROI across your full marketing strategy then drop us a line.
