Understanding what drives results for your business is key to success. And marketing has always played a role in the process.
But nowadays, determining how your marketing contributes to your growth is more challenging than ever. Recently, the market has shifted to Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM) to tackle the challenges of the modern marketing landscape.
Objective Platform is a recognised leader in the field of marketing measurement with a deep understanding of UMM.
Our research department prepared this article to help you understand:
- the basic principles of UMM
- the role and the benefits of UMM
- how to implement UMM
Unified Marketing Measurement Definition
Unified marketing measurement (UMM) is a marketing analytics approach that combines the data and insights by different attribution models into one holistic measurement. Hence, the term 'unified'.
Mainly, UMM blends methodologies like Multi-touch Attribution (MTA), Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), marketing experiments, and Direct Response Modelling.
Moreover, UMM incorporates your prior business knowledge to make marketing measurement relevant to your own business. What more? It can also account for external factors, like events.
What unified means in Unified Marketing Measurement
When we think of UMM, we think of media channels and campaigns. BUT The best measurement solutions unify beyond these. Besides the data and technology involved, UMM also unifies internal and external teams. In reality, UMM offers unlimited possibilities and adds to integrated marketing.
Media channels
First (and stating the obvious), you should host all media data in one place. The data need to be clean, mapped, and ready for use. Along with modelling, you can use these data to run reports and create fundamental insights. Unifying your media data helps you become a better marketer.
Sales channels
Next, you should unify your points of sale. Large companies do not sell exclusively online. They might sell through brick-and-mortar, tele-sales, affiliates, resellers, and the list goes on.
If you don’t unify all your sales channels, you miss essential data and insights. These data are necessary to define the actual effect of your marketing on your sales. So, if you don’t consider them as a whole, you cannot start optimising.
Marketing attribution models
As mentioned above, UMM unifies your attribution models. Relying on one model might be enough for some smaller businesses. But big organisations are more complex; they work with multiple media and sales channels.
So, they need numerous modelling techniques that work better for their specific goals. For instance, you can use multi-touch attribution (MTA) to get insights into customer journeys. But, when you measure offline media, marketing mix modelling (MMM) is more accurate. Unified measurement manages to blend different attribution models to offer a holist overview of your marketing
Teams
Once you unify your sales, media, and models, you need to incorporate UMM within your organisation. That means that you should unify your teams. And technology alone will not deliver you value.
It is the people that can make a difference. As the number of stakeholders rises, it becomes crucial that they all work towards a common goal. If you can have all the stakeholders report to you on the same KPIs, you can make better decisions. And better decisions unlock profit opportunities.
The role of Unified Marketing Measurement in the modern marketing landscape
UMM is the answer to many of the modern marketers' challenges. So much so, that many consider it the next big thing in marketing evolution. Indeed, both Forrester and Google advocate for UMM's dominance in comparison the rest of the current marketing tactics and attribution models.
Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) and Multi-touch Attribution (MTA), when used alone, cannot provide the necessary insights for marketing optimisation. MMM lacks granularity, and MTA faces the limitations coming from the deprecation of third-party cookies. Also, MTA cannot be used for offline marketing measurement. Thankfully, UMM combines methodologies to generate both granular and holistic marketing insights.
Even more, UMM is the only methodology that incorporates prior business knowledge and other factors of influence.
See below how UMM compares to other trusted measurement techniques throughout the history of marketing measurement.
The benefits of Unified Marketing Measurement
All top marketers advocate for the benefits of holistic marketing. UMM significantly boosts holistic marketing in the following ways:
- Brings together measurement on both campaign and channel level.
- Merges offline and digital marketing measurement for successful omnichannel marketing.
- Tackles the challenges related to user-level data in the cookie-less future.
- Incorporates your business intelligence to better fit your market.
How to implement Unified Marketing Measurement
Even though UMM is one of the most innovative solutions in the market, it is not the right choice for everybody. Actually, there are a few technical and non-technical requirements to switch to UMM. Also, the selection of a UMM provider plays a major role in the success of the implementation. And the quality of the marketing insights.
What are the requirements for Unified Marketing Measurement
- Access to adequate data sources.
- Ability to measure a conversion/ sale.
- Practice multi- or omni-channel marketing.
- Dedication to embrace the insights and actively work on them
Steps to switch to Unified Marketing Measurement
Choosing the right provider determines how well a brand will implement and monetise from UMM. With the right approach brands can use UMM to unlock the full potential of their marketing. But, in general, the following steps are necessary for a successful UMM implementation.
- Create a single source of truth
- Turn insights into Actions
- Experiment and Learn
- Plan across channels
- Plan within channels
If you want to discover all the components of holistic marketing, read the detailed measurement framework for UMM.
Ready to take your marketing to the next level?
Discover how we helped a big TeleCom provider in BENELUX to implement Unified Marketing Measurement.
