More than 40 brands purchased and ran national television spots that aired during the 2019 Super Bowl. Each advertiser paid at least $5 million per spot - not accounting for the costs associated with producing and shooting a major TV commercial.
What made that investment worthwhile? Well, the ads reached more than 114 million viewers that night. That's certainly impressive on the surface.
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Those eyeballs are great, but a study by Genesis Media found that 90% of consumers are unlikely to buy something associated with a Super Bowl ad. This means that at a CPM (cost per thousand viewers) of $44, each of those 40 brands wasted at least $4.5 million pushing products to viewers who just didn’t care.
The PR industry has been around for more than a century. Over those many years, the prevailing belief has been that the more people you hit with a message, the better. Marketers who started their practices in traditional or mass channels such as PR, print, or broadcast might still treat impression counts as not merely a critical KPI but the critical KPI when measuring the success of campaigns.
The marketing landscape has changed over the years, though. Technological advancements offer improved data analytics and targeting capabilities, and the industry has a growing emphasis on strategy. Modern marketers must understand that impressions alone do not matter. Unless you know who the viewer is and how those impressions are contributing to your sales pipeline, chasing them is a waste of money.
That’s not to say that awareness is dead by any means. Rather, it’s time for marketers to take a more thoughtful and analytical approach.
Instead of using an overly broad strategy aimed at increasing awareness, marketers can make an impact by being more targeted. The goal should be generating "relevant awareness," which involves reaching only buyers or customers who are relevant to your sales pipeline — the ones who would actually care if they saw a Super Bowl ad featuring your logo.
Apart from the cost savings that result from only trying to reach interested audiences, advanced targeting ads yield a more than 240% increase in ad engagement and a cost-per-click reduction of more than 70%. This type of efficiency makes you more flexible, effective, and creative.
Relevant impressions give you a sense of how large your reachable market is and how much growth opportunity still exists. But that's only the start of the story.
To understand how the relevant awareness you generate directly contributes to your sales pipeline, you need to follow all impressions through that pipeline and down the remainder of the sales funnel.
For example, imagine you’ve generated one million relevant impressions targeting your specific buyer profile. That's great! Now what? There are several questions you should ask yourself, including:
If you’re constantly tracking and measuring engagement at each step along the customer journey, then you’ll be able to understand not only how targeted impressions are performing at the top of the funnel but also whether specific touch points serve as converters or barriers when it comes to getting customers closer to a purchase. This insight allows you to make precise optimizations and strategic adjustments that can boost overall performance quickly and significantly.
On the other hand, if you’ve created a marketing campaign that doesn’t account for the holistic customer journey, it will probably fail. Fortunately, there are tons of free and easy-to-use tracking tools available that will allow you to watch generated impressions as they interact during each step — starting with your ad, then your site, then content and emails, and finally, your shopping cart or purchase forms.
The benefits of focusing on relevant awareness aren’t especially hard to grasp, but you might still be unsure about how to get started. Here’s what we recommend:
With these three steps in mind, know that even if you start small, testing different buyer targeting strategies will almost immediately improve the efficiency of your campaigns. You’ll begin to identify lower-cost, higher-quality leads and drive faster conversions. That’s a winning formula for any marketer.
By Expert commentator
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