Bigger slice: Dominos Australia plots 2% marketing-driven sales rise via Mutinex’s predictive analytics and media planning
The FY25 budget carve-up is out of the way for marketers. Using Mutinex’s Scenario Builder, Domino’s Media Strategy and Analytics Manager, Blake Rand, was able to engineer an expected 2 per cent boost to marketing-driven sales. That’s because he knows what channels to boost, and which to cull.
With the new financial year in full swing, many marketers will have just recovered from one of the most trying periods in their calendar; budget planning. Using a bevy of data from a range of different platforms, marketing teams work hard to create investment plans and then build consensus around a way forward. But budget planning isn’t smooth sailing and the results are often contested, leaving marketers to fight for the channels they believe to be effective.
But not at Domino’s Australia.
This year Group Media Strategy and Analytics Manager, Blake Rand used the Scenario Builder feature in Mutinex GrowthOS to plan the Australia FY25 consumer media budget. Scenario Builder is a tool available to GrowthOS users that allows them to forecast marketing ROI results based on different levels of investment across their channel mix.
Rand still had to find the right insights to drive the overall FY25 investment strategy – but he says planning the budget and building consensus around that plan has been easier than ever before.
“We’ve done market mix before, but it’s never been a living, breathing thing. It’s been a big bang project. Now that we’ve embedded GrowthOS as something that we use ongoing (Domino’s Australia has been using Mutinex GrowthOS for roughly six months) we have buy-in at the CMO and CEO level. So we’ve got the credibility to say this tool is going to underpin how we plan our budget for FY25.”
Scenario Builder eliminates uncertainty by using data from multiple sources for the media planning process and allows Domino’s team to build a plan from a robust model. “From a marketer’s perspective, from a media buyer’s perspective, from a CMO’s perspective, it solves a massive tension point.”
Which is especially useful at the thick end of budget-setting – but equally, day to day and week to week: Amid a stream of disparate sources, the ROI number is what matters.
Mutinex Global CEO and Co-Founder, Henry Innis, agrees. “For a lot of marketers, planning media can be a minefield because they’ve got data from Google, data from their TV buy and data from Facebook for example. None of it connects and there can be a lot of bias in the way that people interpret those results and pick winners and losers. Scenario Builder helps marketers to look at all of those outcomes through the same lens and really compare apples with apples when it comes to planning their investment.”
For Domino’s, planning for FY25 looked significantly different to previous years.
“Now we start with a base plan that I work with our media and marketing teams on, and then we use scenario builder to input different variations and optimise on that plan,” explains Rand. “Most of the variations we test are inspired by things we’ve learned in recent months from MMM.”
A key example that helped to shape the investment mix for the new financial year, were the insights gathered in recent refreshes around the number of channels in play. More, in some cases, can deliver less – so choose wisely based on hard ROI data.
“Our biggest learning in the last several months has been that we can have a bigger impact with our media by throwing bigger punches at the areas that matter most, instead of trying to play in every space,” says Rand.
“When we started to run scenarios we had a set of focus areas that we knew would be core to our performance and we knew roughly the level of investment that would work for us in those spaces based on previous years,” he adds.
“Where Scenario Builder helped was in showing us a range of different outcomes based on investment in what we were calling ‘opportunity spaces’. The question for us was, how do these ‘opportunity spaces’ enhance or detract from our core plan and what incrementality could we drive? In the end we were able to settle on a plan that is forecast to drive 2 per cent of additional marketing-driven sales.”
With confidence in GrowthOS outputs already high, sharing the investment forecast scenarios was an easy way for Blake Rand to build consensus around the plan for the coming year. Hence the team will continue to use Scenario Builder ongoing.
“We consistently learn new things from GrowthOS, so our media plan will no doubt evolve throughout the year,” says Rand. “We expect to come back to Scenario Builder to work through different hypotheses and make tweaks throughout the year.”
Go larger at mutinex.co