TL;DR

• Regardless of trends, fix your fundamentals: arm yourself with the right customer data (LTV) and remove barriers to quick decision-making.
• Regardless of trends, fix your fundamentals: arm yourself with the right customer data (LTV) and remove barriers to quick decision-making.
• Regardless of trends, fix your fundamentals: arm yourself with the right customer data (LTV) and remove barriers to quick decision-making.
• Regardless of trends, fix your fundamentals: arm yourself with the right customer data (LTV) and remove barriers to quick decision-making.

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that we can’t predict the future. After the longest bull market in history, the pandemic paused the party. Forecasts were redrawn, advertisers slashed budgets, and employees were furloughed.

As summer began, digital-first businesses like Doordash, Peloton, and Wealthsimple, who were well-positioned before the pandemic accelerated and emerged stronger than ever. Growth rebounded, favoring companies who had the real-time data to observe changing customer behavior and who could adapt quickly. Look no further than Airbnb’s head-turning $100B IPO only months after laying off 25% of its workforce and shuttering several lines of business. What lessons can marketers learn from 2020 and what should we expect in 2021? We can’t predict the future, but that won’t stop us from trying.

It was my pleasure to discuss these topics with growth guru Michael Kuznetsov, formerly of edesign Health & Talkspace. Our key takeaways are summarized below.

In 2020 the winners had…

DATA

In 2020, we saw dramatic swings in the cost of advertising or CPMs, the price that platforms like Google charge for 1,000 views of an ad. When the pandemic hit, marketing budgets were slashed while viewership spiked, resulting in substantially lower CPMs. TV and ad networks like Facebook saw declining rates by as much as 50%, creating a rare opportunity for savvy marketers to cheaply promote their products. By June, CPM rates had largely recovered, but shrewd companies had exploited this trend for growth. Teams equipped with the data infrastructure to monitor and quickly take advantage of shifting advertising rates outperformed those who didn’t.

CPMs dropped as much as 50% creating an rare opportunity for savvy brands to cheaply scale

THE RIGHT data

While many brands saw the drastically cheaper CPMs, not everyone took advantage of them — why? During the peak of the pandemic, companies were not only concerned about lowering costs but also increasing revenue. Brands that could estimate the revenue and profitability impact of additional marketing spend were able to act. Brands that could project the lifetime value (LTV) of newly acquired customers could confidently test into expanding marketing spend despite the market uncertainty. Businesses that could only track cost data, were left waiting for revenue figures to populate weeks or months later, missing the boat. For additional ideas on how brands can leverage customer LTV data for better decision making refer here.

ACTed

Unfortunately, having the right data to see & size opportunities didn’t empower everyone to use it. The pandemic’s top performers ran experiments to validate their hypotheses, communicated their findings internally, and quickly secured alignment for additional investment. Winners benefited from accelerated decision making — operating in environments where CEOs, CMOs, and CFOs work in lockstep, looking at the same data, and deploying resources to new opportunities with agility. Online learning platform Masterclass is an example of a company that rapidly expanded Facebook advertising despite market uncertainty, helping it close a $100 million funding round during the peak of the pandemic. Brands who entered the pandemic with pre-established standardized reporting, effective experimentation processes, and speedy cross-functional decision-making were best positioned to take advantage of emerging trends.