Shift to Digital: Part 5 - Operational Savings

Where does the money we want to shift come from?

The previous two posts in this series focused on Driving Growth and Building Leadership, but at some point we need to think about how to free up resources to dedicate to the new mix.   It is great to have a vision of two pie charts that split out the entire marketing budget into completely different approaches.   But we do need to find ways to allocate a reasonably fixed set of resources - moving 50% of a budget is vastly different than growing a budget by 50%.

So, here are a list of questions focused on operational and tactical topics.

1. Where is marketing needed vs. not needed?
2. Where is the ROMS (Return on Marketing Spend) strong/weak? 
3. What business and geo-demographic elements explain the variance in ROMS?
4. What is the value of each action leading a sale – by channel/source of traffic? 
5. What is the value of social sharing? (Interesting facts for e-commerce here.)
6. What is the value of an “Offer View” – by channel/source of traffic?  (single offer centric)
7. How do we align the digital footprint with terrestrial sales activity?
8. What value would creative optimization bring to improving conversions?
9. How can we leverage targeting, bidding and interaction history to reduce ‘wasted impressions’?
10. What is true cost of execution of a digital budget?
11. What is the financial contribution of individual touch points?
12. What are the reach, frequency optimums by channel and segment?
13. What is the difference in cost models of reaching consumers on-site and off-site?
14. To what extent does spend on loyalty programs offset ink and airwaves?
15. What is the most effective means of reaching a consumer/segment?
16. Where else can we amortize fixed costs of content production with the most bang-for-the-buck?
17. Which data sets should be integrated in which order to gain efficiency?
18. What is the dollar value of what we know to our suppliers, vendors and market in general?
19. Which loyalty or transactional segments work best for targeting?
20. How many digital impressions does it take to replace a TV ad or a page in a flyer?

I don't know if the answer to that last question is 100,000 or 1,000,000 or even 10,000,000 but it seems to be a worthy goal for an analytic program to focus on.

There are a variety of ways we can approach the shift to digital, but hopefully these 60 questions help provide some guidance on how the analytic program could be developed and managed.