Making a Case for Effective Strategies that Impact Your Business

January 31, 2023 by Nicole Newville

Making a Case for Effective Strategies that Impact Your Business

Your organization relies on you to put in place marketing strategies that will prioritize spend and make a measurable impact on your business. So, where do YOU go when you need the resources to make good decisions, and explain those decisions to the CFO?

The KOSE team is here to assist. We put together a list of white papers from global experts and industry veterans that will help you explain trends and tie your digital strategy to your overall business goals.

Beyond Belt-Tightening: How Marketing Can Drive Resiliency During Uncertain Times

Looking for some fresh perspective on how to approach your marketing budget? This article from McKinsey offers several ideas on creative ways to find savings while still investing in growth drivers. Rather than trimming 8% across all your line items, get creative by thinking about “bad revenue to cut” – which could be trimming an audience, removing a media channel, or adjusting budgets for seasonality.

The State of Marketing Budget and Strategy 2022

This report will help you optimize your marketing budget and prioritize your investment to increase performance.

Nielsen ROI Reports – for Advertisers, Agencies, Media Sellers

Tailored toward advertisers, agencies, and media sellers, these reports will reveal what drives ROI, how to measure, and how to improve on your metrics.

State of Demand Gen/2022

A comprehensive guide to Marketing Charts 6th Annual Survey of demand gen marketers overviewing approaches to demand gen, channels & tactics, strategy, sales & execution, and more.

The 2022 Social Media Trends Report

Learn how to drive digital marketing success in the age of the ‘now’ consumer.

Belief Branding: How the Next Great Marketing Stories will be Written Post-Pandemic

This paper will help marketers answer the age-old question, “What’s next?”. Written by agency experts, they created a playbook to help organizations weather civic challenges and economic uncertainty.

The Intel – Our Favorite Resources to Navigate the Changing Digital Landscape

January 25, 2023 by Nicole Newville

The Intel – Our Favorite Resources to Navigate the Changing Digital Landscape

With the digital landscape changing at lightning speed, keeping up on the latest trends and technical updates while making sure strategic goals are being met, is more challenging than ever.

We’re here to help bring clarity to the chaos. Check out the KOSE team’s favorite reads and go-to resources for technical platform updates, comparisons between channels, and digital trends.

Performance Digital Media Subreddit: www.reddit.com/r/PPC/

Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/

Search Engine Journal: searchenginejournal.com/

Search Engine Watch: searchenginewatch.com

SEO subreddit: reddit.com/r/SEO/

Wordstream: wordstream.com/blog

Programmatic

AdSwerve: adswerve.com/resources/

Digiday: digiday.com/topic/programmatic-luxury/

DV360 Product News: blog.google/products/marketingplatform/360/

Analytics

Analytics Mania: analyticsmania.com/blog/

Measure School: measureschool.com/blog/

Simo Ahava’s Blog: simoahava.com/

6 Simple Steps to Create Your Digital Strategy

January 16, 2023 by Nicole Newville

6 Simple Steps to Create Your Digital Strategy

In today’s fast-paced world, creating an effective marketing campaign can seem like a daunting and time consuming task. Where to even begin? While consumers are still using both a mix of traditional and digital media, having a digital marketing strategy is the key for trackable and targeted success. If you’re thinking, “I don’t have a digital strategy, am I too late?” you’re not alone; according to an article from Smart Insights, 49% of businesses are doing digital marketing but have no defined strategy. The thought of putting together a strategy can seem overwhelming and complex but it doesn’t have to be, in fact, it shouldn’t be. Simplicity is going to be the key solution for an effective digital strategy.

What’s involved in creating a simple digital marketing strategy? Here are six simple steps to take:

1. Audience. Start by defining your audience. The biggest mistake we see companies make these days is not choosing an audience. Concentrating on one segment while neglecting another can feel scary, like you’re missing out on a bigger opportunity, but the truth is that in order to be successful, you must focus your time, resources, and dollars. Once you formulate a successful strategy for marketing your business it’s much easier to get support for expansion of that strategy.

To identify your audience, you can look to several sources –– your site analytics, your sales team and/or research tools that your media partner subscribes to, such as Simmons. To identify your audience, and a great place to start is by analyzing two audience pools –– starting with your most valuable customers and then moving on to a bigger and broader audience of future prospects.

2. Platform. Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is understanding where they spend their time.

3. Action. Your next step is to identify the actions you want your audience to take. Do you want to drive views or encourage sharing? Whatever action you’re looking for, make sure it’s simple and easy to complete. Most importantly, that action you are trying to drive needs to benefit the person completing it. To get started we try to define the user benefits to consider as: entertainment, information, or special offers/deals.

4. Content. Next, look at the content or campaign messages. Ask yourself – what percentage of the audience are we reaching? How frequently will they be exposed to our messages? What seasonal factors should I consider? What information do they need to know before they’ll act on our messages? And finally, how best should we sequence that information?

In our always-on, hyper-connected world this is something people frequently neglect. To be relevant and inspire users to act, messages should be specific and delivered in the right sequence, at the right time. It’s critical at this step in the process that the marketing team, creative team, and media team work together to answer the questions above and work together to define an overall messaging/content strategy.

5. Measurement. Next, look at your plan to measure the action you wanted to achieve and which primary measurement system you want to use for measurement –– Google Analytics or your marketing automation system? Within your plan you should set several measurement checkpoints to monitor your audiences progression through the purchase cycle.

6. Return to the original goal. Look at your original goal –– did you accomplish what you set out to achieve? Which areas of your campaign over-performed? Which under-performed? Once you’ve answered those questions you can begin to simplify your next campaign. When we’re evaluating a camaign we like to perform a simple stop/start/continue exercise with our team, “here’s what we recommend stopping, here’s what we recommend starting and here’s what we should continue to do.” This method of bucketing the three categories keeps things simple and straightforward. It ensures that we continue to focus our time and energy on the tactics that are most likely to yield the biggest return.

This simple, straightforward process will keep you focused as you move forward. Clearly documenting assumptions, goals, and regularly evaluating are the key to continuous improvement. By demonstrating repeated success and dilligency you’ll earn the opportunity to expand your digital marketing to include new initiatives, which you can work to define by using the same six steps.

Amidst Growth, KOSE Hires Joe King as VP, Director of Account Management

September 21, 2022 by Jane Lehman

Amidst Growth, KOSE Hires Joe King as VP, Director of Account Management

by Jane Lehman

September 21, 2022

Formerly of MONO, 180 Amsterdam, Carmichael Lynch

After a new business win for the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, and increased work on multi-year clients Ergotron and Bulwark, KOSE is experiencing significant growth. With this in mind, KOSE has hired agency veteran Joe King to build an account management department for the digital media agency, lead the agency toward continued growth, and personally impact a number of clients’ businesses.

King has spent his career in integrated ad agencies successfully leading teams on an impressive range of brands. Most recently, he helped guide the account management department. In addition, he led various brand teams at MONO, including a portfolio of business for Google and Molson Coors. King also led work for Alfa Romeo, the NHL, Loews Hotel Group, Advance Auto Parts, Harvard Business School and Sam’s Club, amongst several others. Prior to MONO, King lived in Amsterdam and worked at the agency 180. There he led the global adidas account including their massive digitally-led World Cup campaign. He also spent several years working on General Motors and Harley-Davidson.

“The growth of our client’s business is driving the need for structural change within KOSE. As our client’s businesses have grown, their campaigns have evolved to be more complex. They now include more aggressive goals achieved across a broader mix of media channels. They also include sophisticated bid strategies, and tracking across their Marketing Tech Stack,” said Nicole Newville, KOSE Founder and President. “Supporting our clients requires more communication and conversations between teams. Given that, we’re excited to add Joe to drive integration within KOSE, and across our client and agency partners,” she added.

“I’m so impressed with the brilliant minds at KOSE and the work they have been doing. As a result, I couldn’t be more thrilled to be joining this team as the agency continues to grow,” King said.

About KOSE

KOSE is an independent Minneapolis-based digital media agency, founded in 2013 by Nicole Newville, a Minneapolis/St Paul Business Journal 2022 Women in Business Honoree. The agency has grown steadily each year since 2013. KOSE prides itself as a modern digital media agency in the business of human connections and exists to deliver highly personal, relevant and inspiring content to the right person at the right moment through the proper channel. Clients include Ergotron, St. Augustine University for Health Sciences, Bulwark, the University of Minnesota, Honeybear Brands, RevSpring, and Teleflex.

Media Contact:

Nicole Newville

612.670.3139

nicole.newville@kosedigital.com

Do You Have a Pulse on Your Brand’s Health?

June 28, 2022 by Nicole Newville

Do You Have a Pulse on Your Brand’s Health?

If you use a Fitbit or the Activity app on your Apple Watch, you know the value of monitoring exercise and movement. For marketers, it’s equally important to assess the health of your brand.

Brand health is a collection of measures that tells you how well the brand is doing – a total picture of brand success. If you put it off, you might miss important data and warning signs to keep the business on a healthy path.

Why now?

Profitability and prioritizing marketing spend are important to businesses, especially with recent inflation trends. With tight budgets, it’s tempting to simply maintain performance marketing and conversion efforts with existing customers and targets.

Awareness marketing, focused on future demand, may have a lower immediate return on investment. It takes time and is often more expensive than converting current demand – but thriving brands keep a steady focus on the future. They seek to reach customers who don’t have a need for their product or service today but will in the future. In fact, the healthiest brands spend 60% of their overall budget on brand building and 40% on sales activation or conversion¹.

This focus on brand building allows organizations to look at all potential consumers, and analyze how well they’re doing at driving awareness, consideration, and favorability. Done well, these marketing efforts create a pipeline of demand to maintain business growth and viability.

Aid your decision making

It’s impossible to make the most informed decisions about how to allocate marketing investment without knowing where the brand and business are currently situated. Matching current demand to immediate revenue while building future demand is a balancing act for every brand.

A brand health dashboard can help guide resource allocation and measure progress over time.

Metrics

Several metrics can help to benchmark your brand’s current health and marketing efforts. The challenge is aggregating the data points and understanding what they are telling you.

To get started, identify where you have existing data. Website analytics, purchase data and social platforms are a good place to start. Identify the metrics that align with your business objectives and goals.

Here are a few metrics to measure current demand:

Ecommerce conversion rate and revenue
Amazon conversion rate and revenue
Performance marketing results or outcomes (Amazon ads, retargeting)
Qualified leads

These metrics gauge future demand:

New site visitors
Website traffic growth
Database growth
Increase in brand search queries (Google, Bing, Amazon)
Social following growth
Social engagement
Total reach (media impressions)
Unique reach (media impressions)

Identify gaps

Next, figure out where you need more information to understand consumer behavior and business trends.

A good mix of qualitative and quantitative data is valuable. Consumer insight surveys can help measure and understand current brand sentiment. Customer service inquiries and social media comments are also good indicators of brand reputation.

Regular brand tracking gathers quantitative data on awareness, favorability and intent to purchase. You might conduct a brand impact study to gain more knowledge about your current and future customer base.

Frequency

We recommend a regular cadence for reviewing your brand’s health. Consider aligning the timing with key campaigns or initiatives. Gather benchmark data before a campaign to measure true return on investment.

Get started now

At KOSE, we work with clients to gather metrics and insights to gain a holistic view of brand performance and marketing investments. Take our advice and don’t wait. Dig into your own metrics to monitor your brand’s health. If you are interested in building a digital strategy that impacts your brand’s health, contact us today.

¹Rethinking Brand for the Rise of Digital Commerce, WARC, 2021.

Is a Digital Marketing Career in Your Future?

May 5, 2022 by Nicole Newville

Is a Digital Marketing Career in Your Future?

Are you wondering what it’s like to work at KOSE? We asked Assistant Media Planner, Milo Rice. He recently took a few minutes and shared his thoughts on digital marketing and his experience at KOSE.

In your first 6 months at Kose, what did you learn that surprised you the most?

What surprised me the most was the amount of detail that went into everything. From the first steps of planning (which is so precise) to the creative process to trafficking and implementation. But once all that hard work is done, seeing a campaign perform well on whatever platform it is running, is so rewarding and exciting.

What is your favorite platform to work in and why?

I really enjoy working in Google. It is fun to problem solve and make optimizations to get the best performance possible in the beast that Google is. It’s cool to see how detailed you have to be to get your ad seen. When I am hungry I search for the “best Thai food near me” and I will see an ad. Now I know why that ad came up on my page and I know what someone did to get it there.

What’s one piece of advice you’d offer someone who’s considering a career in digital marketing?

Just give it a shot! When I was in school and living post-grad life, I never really considered digital. But I was lucky enough to get a position at Kose. I have learned so much already and I know I’ll never stop learning. The people you will meet are incredibly knowledgeable and are excited to teach people with limited experience. Jump in head first and see what happens!