Client industry: Management Consulting

Pain Points

The client, a global leader in management consulting, was optimizing their marketing solely on last-touch attribution metrics (i.e, where KPI attribution is given to the last observed marketing/media channel).

Month-over-month they were realizing that the correlation between their paid media spending and their KPI (qualified leads) was weakening, and the client was burning their annual marketing budget far too quickly for comfort.

What they were also noticing was that tradeshow attendance would routinely predate an obvious, albeit modest, spike in their KPI. And, over time, the same was observed following blog article posts to their social media.

With all this supposed success in organic media (i.e. marketing efforts that do not require payments to a platform or search engine), the client was close to “turning off” paid media and focusing exclusively on organic efforts.

However — the client’s upper management were uneasy about the situation and wanted a more rigorous quantitative opinion!

Methods

Our first goal was to thoroughly understand their marketing processes and intentions, as well as their broader business goals as a firm. And, to do this, we arranged for client-side, stakeholder interviews.

This client had three years of daily data across two, broad marketing streams: paid media (Google search, LinkedIn + Facebook ads and Gmail inbox ads) and organic activity; and, their major concern was that paid media wasted their time and money.

This setup lent itself well to a time-dependent structural equation model (i.e. a system of equations that interact over time). Such modeling schemes are famously used on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve to stress-test the causal implications of trends and events.

With precedent as our guide, we worked to solve for the directionality of the equations — which is the foundation of isolating causality.

Results

From this analysis we presented the client with several layers of work product across two categories:

1. An optimized advertising spend blueprint, broken-out by channel, tactic, geography and seasonality; and,

2. A lean and automated marketing measurement dashboard that only highlighted, tracked and analyzed the metrics that mattered most to the client’s growth and financials.

And, these analyses ultimately proved that:

• While the client was overleveraged (i.e. consistently overspending) in their lower-funnel media tactics (such as Google search), it was precisely that spending volume that caused their organic efforts to be so effective; and,

• If they were to re-optimize their spending habits to match the market’s natural demand cycles, they would save enough to introduce new, integrated marketing channels to further grow the business.

Working with the client thereafter and keeping tabs on their developments, we noticed a roughly 75% reduction to their paid media waste over six months, and a sustained 6% month-over-month increase in their qualified leads.