There's more to competitive analysis than determining who's the top spender. For many advertisers, local competitive information plays a critical role in the formulation and allocation of budgets. It's also paramount in helping clients to understand how well a company's advertising is performing relative to its competition.
Budget Planning and Allocation
How much should we spend in Buffalo? In Los Angeles? Tulsa? Advertisers and agencies use many different methods to determine their media budgets. Some use case rates. Others use last year's budget. Still others develop budgets based entirely on internal financial considerations.
While these methods are common, they often fail to address market realities. When agencies and ad departments have objective competitive information, they can face, plan and allocate budgets strategically.
The full benefit of VoiceTrak's local tracking is obvious when compared to relevant market share data, as demonstrated below:
This chart compares each advertiser's share of spending relative to their share of stores in a specific market. In this case, McDonald's is both the market leader and the most aggressive spender relative to their share of locations.
Marketing Research & Analysis
Tracking awareness levels, purchase intent and consumer usage of competitive brands is standard operating procedure in many marketing departments. When competitive spending information is overlaid on these data, the potential for accurate and useful conclusions is improved dramatically. Consider the impact of spending information on how you might evaluate the following shifts in awareness.
Here, changes in spending and share of voice are compared to changes in awareness levels. There's an obvious relationship between spending and changes in awareness in this example which is based on real data.
Media Planning
Tracking competitive spending
helps media planners in several ways. It provides a view of each competitor's
media mix, which helps quantify the pressure a client faces in any given
medium. When combined with market share data in a budget allocation model,
our spending data can help ensure that advertisers put their resources
where they're most needed. Furthermore, because we track spending over
time, seasonal patterns can be identified and used to plan flights.
In this chart, it's easy to see the historical spending patterns of the category along with McDonald's spending history and share of voice.
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