Mockingbird empowers parents with premium, well-designed baby gear like their signature Single-to-Double Stroller. With a complex buyer’s journey and an omni-channel media mix, digital-tracking methods like multi-touch attribution failed to capture the full impact that Mockingbird’s marketing efforts had on their business.
Mockingbird needed a holistic approach to marketing and incrementality measurement, so turned to Recast’s MMM platform. Recast has become a pivotal part of Mockingbird’s business, providing a holistic source of truth for their marketing performance and helping them forecast their business as they scale into new channels.
Mockingbird’s Challenge
Mockingbird expanded their distribution beyond DTC to find more parents shopping for premium baby gear. Because their strollers are high-consideration products and their typical buyer’s journey is complex, measuring the holistic ROI of their marketing activity is a tough challenge.
For example, a Mockingbird prospect might comparison shop online, put a stroller on their registry list, and then eventually the prospect’s grandparents-to-be make the stroller purchase in-store at a retail business. There is no way to place a pixel on the checkout scanner at a retail business, so digital-tracking tools don’t tell the full story of marketing’s impact on the business.
“In our business there’s such a long tail of the consideration cycle. There’s multiple marketing touchpoints.” – Michaela Hince, Mockingbird Director of Growth Marketing
To solve these challenges, Mockingbird brought on Recast as a marketing mix modeling (MMM) partner. Recast now provides a holistic source of truth for Mockingbird’s marketing performance across their whole business and helps them forecast and manage their business even as they scale into new channels.
Measuring True Incrementality with Recast
Mockingbird uses Recast to measure the true incrementality of their marketing channels when they don’t have time to run costly and complex experiments. Beyond just click-tracking, Recast gives them insight into how marketing activity drives purchases across their different distribution channels and allows them to forecast the business holistically.
Importantly, Recast also helps the team understand the saturation point of different marketing channels and how much they can continue scaling into them. For example, the marketing team used Recast to make the case for taking aggressive action when investing into TikTok as a new and unproven channel but also recognized the limits of the channel when scaling it.
“Really important for a growth team: what is that point of saturation for this channel where you’re no longer spending dollars efficiently and you need to be finding other places?” – Michaela Hince, Mockingbird Director of Growth Marketing
In addition to using Recast for traditionally difficult-to-measure channels like influencers, Mockingbird has also leveraged the platform to test into direct mail to expand their paid marketing program.
“Recast really is our tool to better understand what is the incrementality of our paid marketing channels. Beyond that, it helps us forecast our business at different spend thresholds by channel. It helps us conduct incrementality tests and holdout tests.” – Michaela Hince, Mockingbird Director of Growth Marketing
Forecasting and Planning with Recast
The executive team at Mockingbird has come to rely on Recast to strategically allocate marketing budget and plan for the future. That’s because the Recast platform delivers the actionable insights that the business needs to be successful.
“Since taking over the program, I’ve relied heavily on Recast to help me forecast the business, especially leveraging the ability to compare different growth scenarios.” – Michaela Hince, Mockingbird Director of Growth Marketing
Michaela Hince, Mockingbird’s Director of Growth Marketing, uses Recast heavily during their monthly and quarterly planning process. On a weekly basis, Recast provides her forecasts and recommendations for channel budget reallocations. From there, Michaela can work with the executive and finance teams to align on a realistic budget given the current performance of Mockingbird’s marketing channels.
“Having that starting place of understanding all that historical performance already and then modeling it out for you is a huge time save,” says Michaela. “I’ll start with the optimizer to understand where the model thinks we’re running efficiently and then I’ll plug it into the forecaster tool to validate what we expect to see as far as CAC in this time period that we’re spending these dollars.”
More broadly, Recast helps Mockingbird’s executive team understand how much of their business is truly driven by their paid marketing spend and budget allocation towards paid channels, both online and offline. Where traditional tracking methods are unavailable, Recast allows Mockingbird to understand and optimize their marketing ROI.
Top Tier Support
The Recast data science support team has worked hand-in-hand with the team at Mockingbird to make the partnership a success. This includes partnering with the team on how to best use the Recast platform as well as customizing it for the unique aspects of Mockingbird’s business. Additionally, the Recast team has provided training to the whole Mockingbird marketing team and constant ongoing support to make sure that the Recast MMM model is responsive to the ever-changing needs of their business.
“The team has been super accommodating over the years of helping with modeling and fine tuning our solutions and being really responsive to strategy questions to help us inform how we should interpret those results.” – Michaela Hince, Mockingbird Director of Growth Marketing
Ready to eliminate wasted marketing spend, optimize your channel mix and plan for the future with reliable forecasting? Book a personalized Recast demo today.
