Today’s CMOs have a lot on their plate: their role is increasingly responsible for overall business growth, managing brand communications, customer experience and in some cases the adoption of new technologies. Each of these responsibilities touch upon the different ways that consumers interact with a brand, making it essential for CMOs—and their teams—to manage a wide-lens view of the consumer journey. But in order to successfully integrate business objectives with data and customer experience, they’ll need to establish marketing strategies in which both work hand-in-hand to support one another.

By achieving this through constant performance measurement and optimization of content, organizations empower themselves to adopt a more agile process of marketing, which enables them to rapidly experiment and optimize campaign content and media spend through engagement. This culture of experimentation—with results to back it up—is key to achieving the always-on stream of content that today’s consumer expects, offering several relevant, personalized permutations of a message rather than the “big idea” campaign that was so popular in the past.

Close the Loop on End-to-End Marketing

Effective marketing today isn’t born just from an initial set of figures, but in fact results in new data that can be used to further optimize that content. This strengthens the creative so that it remains relevant to consumers along the digital journey. Whether an initial set of metrics lives up to expectations or not, data-confident organizations that continually measure performance may use those insights to increase content effectiveness, save in costs over the long-term and maintain trust in their creative partners.

Think about what a campaign that uses data poorly looks like. We’ve all found ourselves haunted by a product we’ve viewed (or even purchased) in our travels across the internet—an experience that can come off as annoying or even downright creepy. That this situation is all too common demonstrates how brands often miss key opportunities for effective retargeting or adapting their message to consumers’ changing priorities or intents. Those who continually optimize content through an agile process rapidly gain and apply new insights to adapt their message to the consumer’s interests or place in the sales funnel, resulting in more relevant and effective targeting.

We took this end-to-end approach in a recent awareness campaign for Gladskin, the Dutch skincare brand, and their award-winning acne treatment. The processes described below enabled the brand to five-times lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and higher-than-forecasted reach. To achieve this, we measured what content brought audiences past initial engagement, then applied those insights to continually change the positioning, messaging and creative for greater results.

Optimizing Content for Increased Relevance

As with any campaign, this one began with an initial set of research on a hypothesized audience. Through preliminary engagements from consumers, we were able to quickly zero in on key insights that informed the next phase of production and user targeting. For example, we noticed that Instagram Story content focusing on models’ faces performed especially well in the awareness stage; this content achieved a 37% higher CTR than story content that focused on the product’s effect on the skin.

This aligned well with what you would expect from a platform like Instagram, as the face-focused content was akin to your standard beauty deliverable. But we found that the opposite was true in the consideration phase: Instagram Story content that performed better at this stage fixated on the skin and science behind the product.

Similarly, content that drove more users to convert focused on the research behind the product’s award-winning formula and customer testimonials, depending on the format used. The former was most effective with carousels that let users dive deeper into the product benefits in detail, while the latter performed best in single-image link ads.

Which type of message performs best per platform or format isn’t set in stone; it’s different per campaign, driving home the importance of closely measuring performance across the course of any campaign. But what both winning formats in the consideration and purchase phases had in common was that they provided consumers with justification to buy after their interest had initially been piqued, a key insight for subsequent retargeting efforts.

One can imagine how sticking to a single type of content throughout the consumer journey is comparatively ineffective in pushing consumers through the funnel; think back on that example of a product listing stalking a customer who happened upon it once. By highlighting new insights through frequent A/B testing, we could rapidly remix transformable assets into more and more attractive deliverables—and even support new creative formats, like Instant Experiences on Facebook.

Boost ROI with Optimized Spend

Cracking the code to the most thumb-stopping, relevant messages to consumers is one thing, but it doesn’t do anyone good when those messages fall on deaf ears. In addition to optimizing content, agile marketing processes let you plug data in to deeply target new groups (or continue to retarget engaged ones) for continued success.

For Gladskin, we worked with Brainlabs (an award-winning digital marketing agency) on a new approach to organizing target interests. Rather than sort them by theme—in this case, things like “teenage skincare” or “acne treatment”—we identified how well each individual interest performed. From there, we divided the top-performing ones from the bottom.

Weekly reporting enabled us to continually replace the lowest-performing interests with new ones. Over time, this process will result in ever-higher engagement rates and reach into new, increasingly relevant audiences over the course of the campaign. Tied with the process of optimizing insights-driven content as detailed above, this end-to-end approach is truly reactive to audience engagements and intents.

As measurement becomes increasingly essential for CMOs to improve customer experience, increase communication effectiveness and drive overall business goals, brands must embrace agile processes that allow for the continuous optimization of campaigns. This repeated experimentation through closed-loop, end-to-end systems provides brands with the insights they need to achieve specific business outcomes for long-term success.

Performance marketing is just the first step.

It’s clear that big data is valuable, but there’s so much of it—often siloed and locked away—that marketers and agencies alike can have a tough time measuring performance. A more integrated approach between data and creative is increasingly important with the rise in programmatic spending, so how can businesses keep up?

From departmental silos to media companies that refuse to share data due to strong privacy regulations and public scrutiny, measuring performance and tracking which media spend offers the best results are common thorns in marketers’ side. And when businesses are unable to measure data with efficiency, consumers are deprived of the personalized, relevant experiences they come to expect when handing over all that data.

The problem gets even more difficult with the rise of new players and platforms entering the arena. As the adoption of voice platforms like Amazon’s Alexa grows, for example, marketers will find themselves more beholden to platforms that might make data-crunching an even bigger challenge in addition to social and traditional search. Some of the biggest players are also the most resistant in sharing user data, facing pressure from regulators and the public to use it responsibly. But marketers need it to effectively inform their ad spend and create experiences optimized for each touchpoint on the consumer journey.

Programmatic’s Popularity Requires More Efficient Data

With programmatic ad delivery on the rise (41% of businesses are investing more in programmatic next year, and an additional 20% said they intend to invest significantly more, according to an Adweek Branded report), efficient access to data for measuring the performance of content becomes all the more important. But where there’s a challenge, there’s opportunity: MediaMonks CEO Victor Knaap believes the programmatic trend will prompt businesses to better integrate data into their creative process. “Programmatic is put into the outer areas of tech, start-ups and media buyers,” says Knaap, “but it is actually a canvas for delivering better creative.”

When data is built into the creative process early on, you can build much more personalized content optimized for the context of the platform. One elegant example is the U.S. Air Force website, which draws on user data to deliver dynamic, targeted content for a more relevant user experience. The U.S. Air Force needed such a data-driven approach because queries in the recruitment process ate up time and money. By tending to prospects’ needs and concerns through the content, they could better identify the most qualified applicants. And that’s important to note: the point of the website revamp wasn’t to generate more recruits, but rather more qualified ones. This heightened the need for highly accurate and actionable data.

First-Party Data to the Rescue

To achieve these goals, brands are hoping to leverage first-party data by investing in data management tools or offering platforms of their own. The U.S. Air Force website again serves as a great example of how brands can offer their own platform to meet these needs. Visitors begin their journey by providing key details like who they are, their work experience and what they hope to gain from a career with the force. This provides a starting point to surface up content that will grow more relevant as they browse.

Customer data platforms are useful, but it can be tough to choose the one that best fits your overall strategy or brand needs: according to the Adweek report, martech vendors have risen from a paltry 250 to about 7,000 over the past six years. Those equipped to provide a more integrated approach with marketers’ creative efforts and planning will undoubtedly prove the most attractive partners.

Aligning data with creative requires a flexible design. Once more, let’s look at how the U.S. Air Force website does it: by tracking users’ paths through the content, the front-end dynamically adapts to produce content on-the-fly. Variables in content include the images displayed, content headlines as well as the body copy itself. Suggested content for continued reading ensures users will never run out of content—and every time they click to read something else, they’re helping to train the website to identify the content they’re most interested in.

This AI-enhanced approach to A/B testing resulted in a 60% increase in conversion rates and 35% increase in higher-quality applications. While this technology is relatively advanced, any business can benefit from identifying opportunities to design with a modular, more flexible approach.

Creative is the crux where marketing and business interests meet the interests of consumers. It’s essential, then, that the marketing message is designed from the ground up to best fit the platform it’s delivered on. This makes it all the more important to adopt a performance-driven approach to creative that recognizes the context in which users interact with them.