Flow, funnels and fixing attribution: Recapping the Reprise School of Performance.
Authored by The inaugural Reprise School of Performance event took place recently, with the event bringing together brand-side marketers, media platforms and senior industry figures to discuss and debate the future of performance marketing.
The event featured presentations from craft leaders at Reprise, alongside a showcase of search insights from Google UK’s Head of Strategic Insights, Gerald Breatnach, Head of Strategic Insights, an insightful panel discussion with marketing leaders from American Express, Deliveroo, and Kimberly-Clark, as well as roundtable sessions where delegates could put their questions to the Reprise team.
So, what were the key takeaways?
What is good performance? Think about flow.
What actually makes for good performance marketing? That was the question addressed by Ed Hockey and Claire Elsworth, as they challenged a lot of pre-conceptions about the term “performance marketing”.
In the opening session of the day, they set the tone as they made the case that performance marketing was not simply about using media to attract consumers at the bottom of the funnel (the infamous notion of “catching people while they’re falling”), but was instead about aiding and enhancing the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey. In other words, it was about aiding customer flow.
By taking a customer-centric view, rather than a channel-centric or media-centric view, and thinking about the journeys that their audiences go on, marketers can make their performance marketing work that much harder, engage audiences more effectively, and drive more revenue from their digital investments.
Read more about Ed and Claire’s session, The building blocks of performance marketing.
There’s a world of opportunity further up the funnel
That focus on how consumers behave throughout the funnel, and the importance of being there for your audiences throughout their journey, was the heart of Danny Blackburn’s session on the role of content.
Sharing a previous encounter with a creative agency representative who challenged him on the value of search, Danny argued that so many brands are missing a huge opportunity to build brand salience and positive customer experiences by neglecting the huge volume of – often non-commercial – searches that occur towards the top of the funnel.
These searches, he made the case, were a prime opportunity for brands to reach audiences at a time when they have genuine wants and needs, allowing brands to better understand and engage consumers, even in sectors where there may not be an obvious ecommerce route to market. And in doing so, he demonstrated, marketers can reduce their reliance on paid and short-term channels, strengthening their return on investment.
Read more about Danny’s session, Utilising search behaviour to improve your customers’ experiences.
Data-signal loss doesn’t mean the end of attribution
With privacy and data loss such huge talking points in the world of digital, just how can marketers prove the value of their investments – particularly in an economic climate where the C-suite is demanding results? That’s the question that Reprise’s Global Head of Analytics, Chris Schimkat tackled head-on.
Key to this challenge was first knowing what it is you actually need to measure. Chris discussed how so many marketers are drowning in data and metrics that measure the wrong thing, instead of honing in on the metrics that actually demonstrate how they are performing against their core objectives. To know whether you are succeeding, you must first understand what success looks like.
With that in mind, he then talked through the concept of real-time econometrics, taking into account reporting from established models and combining these with machine learning techniques to “fill the gaps” created by signal loss. This meant, he explained, that marketers could adopt an approach to measurement and attribution that was durable and resilient to signal loss, helping marketers to understand the impact of their marketing even in an environment of increased consumer privacy.
Read more about Chris’ session, Durable performance with measurement and attribution.
