Nextscreen's CEO discusses three analytics trends that marketers need to embrace for optimal ROI and media management success.

Automotive marketers have been among the most sophisticated and most prolific adopters of digital media in the past five years. Much has been learned during this early phase, and some significant successes have been recorded. Of course, the market doesn't stand still, so savvy marketers will be asking "what's next?" 

There is no doubt that the foundation for change is the increasing significance of program analytics to measure return on investment and media management. This will continue to be accomplished by diversifying on- and offline- media plans in order to interact with the consumer on multiple levels and keep brand consideration in the forefront.

Going forward, winners will build on this idea by following three trends, each of which is more an organizational challenge than anything else.

Expansion of the ROI concept
Digital media have been impressively effective at targeting car and truck buyers late in the purchase funnel. These programs generally show higher ROI than other efforts, and marketing executives are more confident of those measurements. Even so, changes need to take place. 

First, get back to the ROI concept. In other words, don't confuse efficiency improvement with ROI. I have seen many cases where a program manager was deeply focused on tactics that would drive up -- such as clickthrough rates from enthusiast sites -- but really couldn't quote comparative ROI numbers across media or programs. As an example, if segmenting conventional media drives up CTRs by 50 percent but there are alternative (albeit unsegmented) media that are inherently 300 percent more efficient, which will have the better ROI? ROI is about knowing actual total returns on investment and re-allocating spending accordingly.

Second, the ROI concept has to be broadened to better evaluate differences between correlation and causation. As one automotive executive said to me, "If I stand outside one of our dealerships with a sandwich board advertising my brand, there will be a high correlation between impressions and purchases. But I won't have sold any incremental units." That is to say, we have to be increasingly sure that marketing programs with high measured ROI aren't primarily measuring impressions or interactions with buyers who would have purchased the brand anyway. 

Both of these steps will require that executives build an analytical culture and integrated data across programs -- and within agencies -- to drive increased buyers in the late purchasing funnel, instead of increased traffic that may have little intention to purchase. There are many client-specific steps to doing this, but everyone should have some form of segmented metrics by funnel stage, testing for funnel movement and complete cross-media ROI reviews.

Remapping spending in the earlier parts of the purchase funnel
In talking with automotive executives, many of them feel trapped between late funnel programs that measure well and broad-reach programs that are only vaguely targeted to any specific part of the funnel. These executives know that they need to reach early and mid-funnel buyers -- in the needs assessment and feature evaluation phases, where buyers are actively thinking about their next vehicle -- but doing so is a challenge. 

One way to begin dealing with this issue is to experiment actively with new media. Digital magazines and interactive TV in particular offer environments that can capture consumers in the early and middle parts of the funnel. They can be more carefully targeted to consumers in that funnel segment than traditional media. And, they provide a large canvas on which to display the brand, a factor that is critical to product launch and brand conquest during a shopper's browsing phase.

A second factor in driving better ROI from early and mid-funnel consumers is to regularly drive media plan diversification. While each brand will differ, as a general rule both high impact and high reach are harder to produce the less diverse the media plan. With new media types appearing regularly, a consistent campaign of re-diversification will be essential to a winning marketing plan.

Multipart programs accelerate funnel movement
Marketers who have strong ROI measurement with clearly defined goals (e.g., brand consideration, conquest purchase intent, showroom traffic, et cetera) matched to appropriate ROI targets will find more effort going into designing multipart programs. Such programs carefully map a set of relatively seamless movements of consumers along the purchase funnel; for example, an ad leading to a sneak preview leading to a survey leading to a variety of follow-up actions.

Despite the seeming obviousness of this concept, many programs do not carefully think through an integrated set of interactions that the brand can have with the consumer. More often than not the consumer, if he is offered a clear interaction at all, is merely dumped on the marketer's home page and left to fend for himself. The consumer then engages with the brand in a desultory way, leading to lower purchase rates and a brand that edges ever closer to commodity status.

In part this is because consumers are frustratingly diverse in their habits, resulting in complex mapping exercises to realistically cover different consumers. But because this can be hard, the next five years will see the best marketers increasingly designing and offering consumers enticing paths for interacting with the brand through multiple media channels.

In addition, new interactive media will make it much more possible to create these interactions. What if a full-screen flash ad in a digital magazine ends with a configurator for the product? Or, what if a 15-second spot on interactive TV ends with easily-browsed local inventory?

In order to successfully market to all segments of the automotive purchasing funnel, marketers need to experiment and diversify on- and offline media plans while continuing to track each program's return on investment. Do you have a specific budget line item for testing new media? Do you have clear, client-approved criteria for selecting new media to make sure they are really new, not simply variants on a comfortable theme? Do you have a separate analytics line item and team at the brand level? Is the budget sufficient for real analytics, or does it simply cover basic measurement?

Fortunately, none of the three trends mentioned requires radical thinking. All of the concepts are an extension of what the industry is already doing in bits and pieces, but will require organizational change and leadership.

Tom Martin is CEO of Nextscreen. Read full bio.