As we move into 2023, you’re probably evaluating your current marketing mix and starting to think about adding new and emerging channels. Whether you’re curious to see if you could leverage TikTok’s extreme popularity to promote your business or you want to gauge the impact of OTT advertising for your brand, it’s important to go around testing new channels in the right way.
One cardinal step in testing out new marketing channels for your business is setting baselines. Baselines give you numbers to compare your test metrics to so you know whether the new channel is performing well or poorly. Without baselines, you won’t know where you stand with a new channel and could end up wasting money on a poorly planned test.
In this blog, we’ll walk through why you need to be testing new channels in the first place and how to set baselines for those channel tests in Rockerbox.
Your marketing mix may be working perfectly fine, but if you don’t test into new marketing platforms, you run the risk of becoming stagnant. While the old standbys of Facebook and Google usually deliver, there are always new platforms and options coming on the scene that you could leverage for your business. These aren’t the only reasons you should test in channels.
Are you thinking user-first or channel-first? Thinking user-first means you’re focusing your marketing channel decisions on who your users are and which channels they’re on. If you do your research and find out that your audience is highly active on Snapchat, for example, you need to be on Snapchat. Trying new channels can expose you to your current users in potentially more impactful ways and help you acquire new customer to reach your growth targets.
Also, don’t assume you know where your audience is. The answers might be different than you think and might uncover new channels you wouldn’t have thought to test otherwise.
When reaching users on multiple platforms, however, you do run the risk of too much channel overlap and redundant ad spend that’s not ultimately resulting in more conversions. With Rockerbox, you can visualize your channel overlap to make sure your new channel tests are helping and not hurting your bottom line.
If you don’t test into new channels, you’ll never know how well a new channel could work for your business. It could even out-perform your tried-and-true tactics, but you’ll never know unless you try. The reality is that even your best channels may not be the best option for ever. Changes in technology, privacy legislation, and other developments could mean tactics that worked once simply don’t work as well any more, and it’s worth it to regularly test into new channels to keep your marketing mix healthy and improve your overall ROAS and CPA.
Speaking of channels that don’t work well anymore, you’ve likely seen several channels in your strategy that don’t work like they used to. Or maybe they never worked that well, and they’ve simply stayed in your mix out of habit. Testing into new channels gives you more options of where to allocate your budget that will actually make a difference in helping you reach profitability.
When you have a platform that tracks your campaign performance and spend across all of your channels, it’s easy to leverage that data to uncover insights to inform your marketing strategy. In Rockerbox, you can use data gathered on your existing channels as a way to set baselines for your new channel tests.
1. Navigate to the Attribution Report UI. The attribution report includes performance and spend information for all of your different channels down to the granular level.
2. Select a relevant channel to set a performance goal against. For new channel testing look at channels that play a similar role in your existing marketing mix.
What that means is, when you launch TV, for example, you can’t expect it to perform like branded search. Think about the new channel, what role it plays in the funnel, what channels you expect it to behave like. Then set your baseline based on the context you already have.
3. Set your de-duplicated performance benchmark or target based on the de-duplicated CPA or ROAS for the channel or tactic.
This blog shows you how to find your baselines based on the data that Rockerbox provides to customers. Note that if you were to use in-platform benchmarks to set baselines, you wouldn’t be able to make accurate comparisons because platforms use different measurement methods. Rockerbox standardizes methods, making it easier to set realistic comparisons.
Once you’ve set your baselines, the next step is to test and continually evaluate. Learn more about evaluating your channels with Rockerbox in our help docs article, “What to look for when launching a new channel.”
If you’re not yet a Rockerbox customer, reach out to us today to learn how Rockerbox can help you test new channels, optimize existing ones, and make the most of your budget.
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