Harnessing Data to Optimise Your Marketing Mix
Harnessing Data to Optimise Your Marketing Mix
In today’s marketing landscape, senior marketers, brand managers, and media planners are under more pressure than ever to deliver results.
With tighter budgets, growing channel complexity, and shifting customer behaviours, optimising your marketing channel mix has become a critical task.
But how can data and analytics – particularly attribution modelling and econometrics – help you refine your strategy, improve ROI, and make smarter decisions about where to invest?
Why optimising your channel mix matters
Too often, brands rely too heavily on a narrow set of channels, typically those that delivered early success, like search or social. But what built your business yesterday won’t necessarily grow it tomorrow. Over time, this overreliance can lead to diminishing returns, missed opportunities, and stunted growth.
To scale, marketers must broaden their channel strategy without losing sight of performance. This means balancing short-term tactics that drive sales with longer-term brand-building activity, using data to find that equilibrium.
How can data help you strike the right balance in your channel mix?
Marketing analytics gives you the visibility you need to understand what’s working, what’s not, and why. By applying tools like econometrics and attribution modelling, you can isolate the true impact of each channel and avoid assumptions that lead to inefficient spend.
We often find that channels underperform for one of three reasons:
- Poor structural fit – e.g. a client found that radio didn’t work due to category dynamics.
- Inefficient buying – e.g. another brand discovered that TV could work if bought at standard rates, not premium slots.
- Deployment inefficiencies – e.g. overinvesting in social media during peak periods created diminishing returns, which improved once spend was distributed more evenly.
When you understand the why behind performance, you’re in a better position to refine your mix, but that starts with having the right data.
Getting a complete view across your channels
Effective optimisation starts with robust data. At MetaMetrics, we work closely with media agencies and in-house marketing teams to collect weekly deployment and spend data across all marketing channels. This data is reviewed, cleaned, and sense-checked before analysis begins.
The insights gained from this process are key to building effective models and shaping a clear narrative that helps businesses understand what’s driving performance.
By integrating online and offline data sources and breaking down silos, you can build a more accurate picture of your full marketing ecosystem, helping you avoid decisions based on partial or skewed information.
Measuring what matters
Cross-channel attribution is essential for understanding the contribution of each channel to overall results. Without it, you risk over- or under-investing in certain channels based on incomplete insights.
One effective approach is to identify which brand metrics are most closely linked to business outcomes, assess how much they contribute to performance, and understand what drives them. This helps marketers capture both short- and long-term impact and make more confident investment decisions.
At MetaMetrics, we apply this approach by modelling brand metrics alongside sales. First, we analyse which brand metrics correlate most with sales. Next, we include those metrics in the main model to measure their influence on sales. Finally, we model the drivers of those metrics to understand how marketing activity affects them.
While there’s no universal formula for quantifying long-term effects, combining models in this way gives marketers a more holistic view.
Making smarter budget decisions
Once performance is properly understood, marketers can begin to reallocate budget based on evidence, not gut feel.
Attribution models and econometrics give you a framework for redistributing spend where it’s most effective. Whether that’s pulling back on inefficient channels or optimising media buying strategies, the goal is the same: to improve ROI and drive sustainable growth.
Importantly, we advise clients not to treat ROI as the only planning metric. Econometrics should support decision-making, not replace it. It’s a tool to explore possibilities, not a button you press for answers.
Responding to changing customer behaviours
The media landscape is evolving rapidly. New platforms emerge, behaviours shift, and consumer journeys become more fragmented. As a result, delivering a consistent and joined-up message has never been more complex.
But with this complexity comes opportunity. It’s pushed marketers back to the fundamentals of effective advertising — identifying the right message, for the right audience, delivered in the right place, at the right time, with the right frequency — and questioning how well each channel supports that goal.
As the landscape evolves, we keep abreast of the latest developments – continuously assessing new platforms, channels and tactics, to respond to shifting behaviours. This helps our clients maximise future performance in a fast-moving market, optimising overall budget use.
We can help with data-driven decision making
Optimising your channel mix isn’t just about chasing ROI, it’s about building a future-proof strategy that balances performance with growth.
By integrating high-quality data, leveraging advanced analytics, and staying alert to shifts in customer behaviour, you can make smarter decisions, unlock new opportunities, and achieve better results across the board.
At MetaMetrics, we help clients navigate this complexity every day, giving you the tools and insights to evolve your marketing mix with confidence.
