Evaluating media budget effectiveness and finding optimal media mix has always been an important and difficult task, and it’s even more so in the current situation during the COVID-19 outbreak. In this article we will discuss Facebook’s and experts’ advice on adjusting marketing mix models to the situation on the market and explain how our solution can be useful to marketers today.

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Marketing budget allocation is a very important strategic process. And making the right decision is especially difficult when game-changing situations like the COVID-19 outbreak happen. Today it’s necessary to invest in channels that will bring measurable results. Marketing Mix Modelling is a well-tried, reliable tool that has been helping marketers to make well-informed strategic decisions and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. In a previous article we said that modern MMM solutions meeting advertisers’ requirements and industry standards are perfect for cross-media measurements.

But when consumer behavior and demand change so dramatically as we are witnessing today, the historic data in the currently used models becomes less relevant and the new information is not enough for analysis. The burning question here is how to update existing models so that they could be applied in the current situation and generate accurate and reliable results. Answering it will help marketers to launch effective campaigns under the current circumstances, manage budget allocation and understand the short- and long-term impact of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Facebook analysts and marketing industry leading consultants agree on actions that will help you to adjust MMM models to the current market conditions. Even though their report doesn’t reveal any extraordinary knowledge, not all solutions available today can do that. But our approach agrees with what digital giant experts recommend and delivers accurate and reliable results. We in AdoptoMedia have been successfully helping our clients to optimize media mix and budget management even during this challenging period. Further we will discuss a few actionable recommendations on adjusting Marketing Mix Models.

• Using more granular and high-grade data will help you better understand how recent changes have affected the market. Since many countries introduce restrictions regionally depending on the pandemic situation in a town or city, national models cannot provide an accurate picture of the marketing output. We use regional data at a weekly level in our models, which has proven to be very effective. Even though more granular data can be used, it does not necessarily mean better or more accurate output. We also always check the data quality and apply over 10 statistical tests to verify model results (all the tests are available to the client). Using regional models instead of national ones is the right approach not only for challenging times, but also for stable periods as they generate far more accurate results, which we discussed in a previous article.
• Relying on the best practices in terms of media and creatives guarantees better results, and with AdoptoMedia solution you can identify channels and messaging that works best. It will be more effective than dramatically reducing ad spends now to maintain ROI, because this move might have negative long-term effects on the brand-equity and future sales.
• Fine-tune models with experiments to increase their accuracy or test your theories. On our platform you can run what-if scenarios to see how budget reallocation will affect marketing ROI or sales, which is especially handy now when companies are trying to optimize their spends. Experts also recommend creating pessimistic and optimistic scenarios to be prepared for any outcome.
• Frequent optimizations are necessary in rapidly changing conditions, and our platform allows even for in-campaign optimization. Automatically generated reports in a form of dashboards make it easy to analyze results and adjust campaigns. 

This advice will allow you to build Marketing Mix models suitable for current conditions. Yet it’s worth pointing out that they should be applied not only to overcome challenging situations like the COVID-19 outbreak but also to improve marketing performance in general during stable times.

Another important thing today is to act carefully, analyze data you gather, try to understand the short- and long-term impact of the outbreak. AdoptoMedia offers an advanced tool to manage media budget, optimize spends, automate marketing operations, adjust your tactics and strategies with account for the COVID-19 factor. Our AI enhanced solution builds models automatically and quickly unlike earlier MMM solutions. Apple Mobility Index (other available mobility indexes can also be used) in the models allows to account for the COVID-19 factor. We can also take into account the impact of creatives to measure the effectiveness of specific messages. Our solution covers both digital and traditional media, so you can evaluate the performance of a whole campaign with a breakdown by channel. If you want to know what channels to invest in now and how to optimally allocate your media budget, try AdoptoMedia.