Insight communities have emerged as the best tool to quantify resonance, the key mid-funnel component in measuring advertising effectiveness.
While still one of the top monetization models, advertising has lost ground to an expanding array of alternatives, chief among them, subscriptions. A key factor in this phenomenon is how challenging it is to capture the complete value of an ad or campaign.
Even though some aspects of an advertising campaign (reach, sales) are easy to measure, others remain elusive. And yet, by not tracking them, you could be missing out on a major source of value.
Take resonance for example. Resonance represents the ability of an ad campaign to break through, deliver your message to consumers and change their attitudes about your brand. By not measuring it, you don’t have a full picture of the impact of your campaign and you’re more likely to make ill-informed decisions.
How to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign
Let’s step back briefly. The “Three Rs” framework —reach, resonance, reaction— is widely known as an effective way to evaluate your advertising campaign, measure whether an ad works, and determine if it has been seen by the right people.
- Reach measures whether a campaign was relevant (did it reach the intended audience?)
- Resonance determines if the message influenced the audience (how do people feel about my ad?)
- Reaction considers what the consumer did after seeing the ad (did the campaign influence a purchase decision?)
Of all three components, resonance is the one that tries to capture the depth of the emotional connection between a consumer and your brand. Most sales are, in fact, resonance-based.
Why measuring brand resonance?
There are multiple reasons to invest in measuring brand resonance. These are the most notable:
Resonance measurement delivers mid-funnel transparency: In order to determine if brand messaging is hitting the mark, resonance measurement evaluates whether a campaign is driving awareness, ad recall, affinity, and purchase intent.
Resonance measurement can be scaled across platforms: Once used only for linear TV advertising, resonance can be scaled to assess digital, social media, and multi-platform campaigns, and measure their impact individually or combined.
Resonance complements existing ad measurement tools: In fact, traditional, UX-friendly reach measurements (ratings, clicks) can boost resonance reach to more accurately understand audience size and advertising impact.
What’s the most effective way to measure brand resonance?
While we can all agree brand resonance is worth measuring, how to do it is a matter of debate. Media organizations often run stand-alone surveys. Alas, response rates are low, they barely register at UX level, don’t provide any longitudinal data (repeated observations of the same variables over a long period of time), and there’s no guarantee participants have been exposed to the campaign at all.
Hiring an external agency isn’t much of an answer either. You’re looking at $25K for a study they would take up to six weeks to deliver.
If you run brand studies on a global scale, you require relationships with multiple partners (countries often have government-mandated measurement systems). You may be working with 30-plus organizations, a considerable challenge if your team isn’t large enough to manage that volume of data.
Any media company relying on these solutions would objectively be far removed from the end consumers, let alone knowing anything about them.
The community approach
Given these time consuming and expensive alternatives, building your own community is likely to generate better results measuring resonance. You can do things in house, at scale, and more efficiently. The data is also of much higher quality.
By establishing a verified, highly responsive group of testers segmented for your research needs, you can collect insights almost immediately to better understand the impact of their advertising campaign.
Using a community to measure resonance can also result in quick and valuable feedback when building products and features. In a highly competitive environment like media, the ability to adapt and pivot is the greatest comparative advantage.
With Alida, you can leverage resonance measurement into new opportunities to innovate. Learn how.
