With more people isolated at home and using digital media, getting the most out of a brand’s digital investment is more important than ever. How do brands maximize their investment? Now is the ideal time to reassess marketing goals and make adjustments where necessary. Is the current plan getting consumers to buy more products more frequently? What is speeding up their roadway to buying? How is the brand getting new customers and motivating existing ones to become more invested and active? And how does the brand regain and connect with elapsed and inactive customers? Here are three actions to consider and employ.

Identity Management

Identify, activate and measure the brand’s past, present and potential customers. What this does for existing customers is that it allows the brand to better understand and spot them on whatever platforms, channels, and devices they employ while being able to tailor personalized messages. This individual-based tactic will generate greater customer success and loyalty. One way to achieve this is to issue personalized IDs for each customer that not only recognizes them each time they log in, but also rewards them. Not only does this alert a brand on how often a customer visits their site, but it also indicates what they were interested in.

Connecting Online and Offline

Measuring customer activity today means more than knowing what the consumer is looking at online but also what they may have purchased offline. Tying the two together enables a brand to target ads of interest to consumers that will drive and unite both online and offline behaviors. This is especially important to retailers. For the first quarter of 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 90% of retail sales are still made in the store. eMarketer reported that 53% of Americans research products online, with a third of them then visiting the merchant to make the purchase. Knowing what consumers bought in store and what brought them in helps refine a brand’s strategy. Simply tallying clicks confines brands to making marketing decisions based on a small portion of sales. Clicks won’t tell brands how many offline sales were generated nor measure cross-device conversions. Gathering both online and offline sales information permits brands to gain a bigger view and to strengthen their strategy.

Openness

A brand’s social media vending partner must be open and transparent. They need to share validation data and provide enough information so the brand can measure its success. Can the current vendor handle everything from audience identification to performance measurement of a brand? If so, can they measure performance as well as target and trigger digital media to that consumer? Can they give the brand a complete view of the customer journey? It’s also important that a vendor be mindful of their purpose. In addition to delivering statistics, are they able to help a brand’s return of investment by gauzing its incremental impact? Brands who don’t have vendors who are responsible and capable need to revisit the marketplace and find one who is and then leverage digital media measurement for better success.