Optimizer
Sellforte's Optimizer helps you plan your future media investments so that you will hit your sales targets.
Overview
Optimizer helps you build scenarios for the future media budget allocation. You can choose between two optimization objectives:
- Find an allocation that maximizes sales from a certain budget.
- Find an optimal budget that reaches a certain sales target.
You can set constraints for the optimization, such as how much the investment to each media can vary. After a scenario is configured, the Optimizer finds an optimal budget allocation using your inputs and the underlying Marketing Mix Model (response curves, adstock etc.). Each scenario has the following outputs in charts and tables:
- Forecasted total sales, decomposed to base sales, promotion-driven sales and media-driven sales
- Media budget allocation across advertising channels
- Each advetising channel's investment per week
- Estimated ROI for each advertising channel
Annual planning
Optimizer is a great tool for annual planning discussions, where the most important consideration is the size of the total marketing budget and whether it's sufficient for reaching next year's sales targets. Optimizer helps the marketing team evaluate different budget scenarios, and to prepare for the discussion with the CFO and finance team. Typical scenarios:
- Same budget and allocation: How much sales can you drive next year with the same budget?
- Same budget, moderate changes by media: How much sales can you drive if each channel can be changed +/-30%?
- Same budget, major changes: How much sales can you drive if allocation to channels can be changed without constraints?
- Total budget +20%: How much sales can more budget drive?
- Total sales +5% vs last year: How much budget is needed?
Quarterly and monthly planning
Optimizer is your best friend also in quarterly and monthly planning, where the marketing plans are detailed and adjusted based on most recent progress and learnings. Is the company hitting sales targets or falling behind? Has media been performing as expected? You can use Optimizer in various ways depending on the situation:
- If more sales is needed to hit sales targets, analyse how much more budget would be needed and for which channels
- If there is more budget available, test scenarios how much more sales could be driven with different budget levels
- Find optimal budget allocation across weeks to avoid over-spending on weeks with naturally low demand
- Find optimal budget allocation across media channels based on latest insights on which media is performing well
Unique features
Sales forecasting
Optimizer forecasts the total sales of your company, not only for media-driven sales. This is a game-changer for marketing teams and finance teams, since it enables you to find optimal budget allocations for reaching a specific sales target. The sales target could be for example annual, quarterly or monthly.
Planning marketing becomes more agile when you can track your sales progress during the year, and continuously adjust marketing budget so that the company hits its sales targets.
Optimal weekly budget
Optimizing budget pacing by allocating marketing spend more effectively across weeks can be a sizeable lever in budget optimization. Optimizer understands timeperiods when demand is naturally lower and timeperiods when there's more buyers in the market, and adjusts marketing budgets by week accordingly. This makes Optimizer-generated scenarios realistic. They are not theoretical budgets where the marketing spend is spread evenly across weeks.
Cross-market optimization
If the scope for your Marketing Mix Model includes multiple markets, you can use the Optimizer also to find optimal budget allocation across markets. This is a highly relevant feature for example for eCommerce firms and Retailers operating across multiple geographies.
When conducting cross-country optimization, the Optimizer uses market-specific media characteristics, such as response curves for Meta prospecting campaigns in Germany, in the underlying optimization algorithm.
Advanced scenario configuration
As your experience with Optimizer increases, you have the option to start giving more detailed guidance to the Optimizer for building the scenarios. This is done by adjusting the scenario constraints for the optimization algorithm. For example, you can:
- Limit the possible investment range for each media channel
- Adjust weeks when an advertising channel can be active
- Adjust forecasted base sales to match your own forecast models
Furthermore, you can also
- Export scenario configs to an external file for furthe editing, and import it back when you're done
- Export scenario outputs, such as media allocation and forecasted sales to a file
- Save scenarios for future use
FAQ
You can freely choose the optimization timeperiod based on your needs. For example, you could choose to optimize the next month, next quarter, or next year.
Yes, this is possible in the Optimizer.
Yes, you can export all the optimal weekly media allocation and use it for buying media.