How Luxury Brands Should Tackle Content Marketing Attribution

Attribution is a chief challenge for digital marketers, and that’s especially true for luxury brands. While 40 percent of luxury purchases are influenced by a digital experience, e-commerce purchases account for only 4 percent of luxury sales.

Research predicts that online luxury sales will triple by 2020, indicating a heightened need for luxury brands to understand the campaign touch points that lead to online conversions and developing brand awareness.

In the case of luxury brands, where there is a large discrepancy between online influence and attributed online sales, a precise measurement process is an important part of being able to calculate accurate ROI.

Analyst Rebecca Lieb advises luxury brands to measure metrics like brand reputation, share of voice, and intent to buy when monitoring social initiatives. “[Look to] attentive listening to consumers, the content they like, and what resonates with them deserve further investment,” she said.

When online fashion and beauty retailer ASOS created a brand advocacy campaign, “Access All ASOS,” with influencer marketing platform Traackr, its goals were to engage its most social fans, inspire authentic mentions, and drive traffic to ASOS.com. The brand then tracked a number of KPIs (key performance indicators) that corresponded with these goals, including increase in social media engagement (with the hashtag #AccessAllASOS), positive brand mentions associated with “Access All ASOS,” and the increase in referral traffic during the campaign.

The results were impressive. “Access All ASOS” reached 12 million audience members on Instagram and Twitter, the number of spontaneous brand mentions rose 600 percent, and web traffic referrals increased by 800 percent. That gave ASOS the confidence to invest further in the campaign, doubling the size of its “Access All ASOS” efforts.

ASOS’s strategy represents a key feature of smart marketing programs in 2016: It focuses only on the metrics that measure to what degree the brand achieves its goals.

The importance of optimization

Assessing specific and targeted analytics allows brands to understand which pieces of content perform the strongest in different arenas. While ASOS’s “Access All ASOS” campaign ran effectively on Twitter and Instagram, the brand had to first test a wider variety of platforms before it was ready to optimize for the best-performing channels in its second round of promotion.

Content optimization means assessing analytics and planning for the next phase of creation and distribution. It not only ensures content is optimized for specific channels and demographics, but also provides the data to justify the paid promotion of certain pieces of content.

As digital media buys for luxury brands increasingly focus on social content, having a firm methodology for measuring and improving campaigns is absolutely vital. And if they put one in place, content marketing ROI won’t just be an aspirational fantasy.

This is an excerpt from “The Marketer’s Guide to Luxury Content.”