How to Unlock Growth Through Underserved Marketing Channels

As media channels continue to evolve and proliferate, developing an effective cross-channel strategy has become increasingly complex — particularly as many are still emerging, underutilised or harder to measure.

“Channel strategy has always been pretty hard, but today it’s [evolving] fast,” says Holden Bale, global chief strategy officer at Merkle. “We project that by the end of this decade, 100 percent of advertising will be addressable, shoppable and accountable to performance outcomes.”

As brands navigate this increasingly complex ecosystem, success hinges on selecting the right mix of channels — each with its own strengths, trade-offs and demands.

Sports sponsorships, retail media networks (RMNs), influencer partnerships and community-centric platforms are gaining popularity, but have been underserved due to a lack of quality data and poor measurement practices.

Below, The Business of Fashion shares how to understand and quantify the value of these channels, with insights from its latest knowledge report, The CMO Brief: What’s Driving Results in Fashion and Beauty Marketing — in partnership with tech-enabled data science firm, Ekimetrics.

Convictions

Sports Sponsorship Drives Cultural Relevance

• The sports sponsorship market is projected to grow from $63.1 billion in 2021 to $109.1 billion by 2030, according to PwC.
• However, ROI on sports sponsorships is highly variable — ranging from 1.2x to 4.1x — offering significant rewards when done right, but risking wasted investment if managed poorly, according to Ekimetrics.
• “Sponsorship is typically an upper-funnel driving tactic. So, if you’re only looking at sales results, you will not be capturing the full impact of what that sponsorship is driving,” says Sona Abaryan, partner at Ekimetrics.
• “How will you measure reach? Will the data quality be strong? Are you making a significant enough investment for the impact to show up clearly? Having a solid measurement plan is absolutely critical,” she adds.

Retail Media Networks Extend Brand Visibility

• RMNs are advertising platforms owned by retailers with in-app, transactional e-commerce capabilities. Today, they are becoming a formidable advertising avenue.
• Nordstrom was the first major fashion player to launch an RMN. At the end of 2021, the luxury department store chain enabled brands to advertise to Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack customers via on- and off-site media campaigns.
• According to research and advisory firm Coresight Research, the global RMN market is set to grow from $179.5 billion in 2025 to $257.3 billion in 2028.
• Ekimetrics’ data also claims RMNs can offer a 15 percent higher return on investment (ROI) above average in the beauty sector, and up to 30 percent above average in fashion.
• “We are tracking [how] the next phase of this will be technology that measures footfall in shopping malls, while also directly capturing how that impacts spend,” says Joe McDonnell, director of global consumer, marketing and retail trends at trend forecasting company WGSN. “So you can directly measure how many people have seen your outdoor advertising and then quantify the push to purchase. This is relatively unchartered territory.”

Influencer Partnerships Can Build Advocacy and Community

• In 2025, collaborating with influencers with varying degrees of reach is nothing new. However, the metrics for success constantly fluctuate.
• According to Ekimetrics’ data, influencer partnerships consistently perform at a 15 percent higher ROI than the average for both beauty and fashion brands.
• Jonathan Bottomley, CMO at Calvin Klein, views cultural partnerships with talent as a key lever for the brand to effectively respond to the zeitgeist.
• “When you think about the influencer engine, there are hundreds of people who you want to work with around the world. Some are people of real renown, others are more micro but can allow [access] to a cultural event at a certain time of year or in a certain location,” says Bottomley. “That sense of currency is key. It drives relevance and consideration, which then translates into more tangible metrics.”

Brand Community Builds Brand Power

• As traditional marketing channels become more fragmented and less predictable, brands are turning to their communities for deeper, more authentic engagement.
• For Rare Beauty, open dialogue with customers in harder-to-measure channels is a core strategy. The brand was early in establishing a community base on social messaging platform Geneva, and today it leverages TYB, a play-to-earn community management platform that allows it to engage and reward fans for completing brand-oriented actions.
• “We would never want to stray from community engagement and the tools we use to keep that conversation open,” Katie Welch, Rare Beauty’s CMO tells BoF. “It comes back to our founder’s mission of wanting people to feel celebrated for who they are. You do that through community engagement, even if it’s more challenging [to quantify].”
• Indeed, Bale likens channel strategy to tending to a garden. Some parts require meticulous attention: your brand image, your direct marketing spend, your carefully crafted campaigns. “But then there are these wild offshoots,” he says. “Sometimes, the best approach is to let them thrive without interference.”

Solutions

Create a Holistic Measurement Approach

• To successfully interpret the impact that these channels are driving, they should be measured together — analysing marketing performance holistically and ROI incrementally.
• “If I only take advantage of the signal that’s available to me, which is click-through rates, engagement rates, time on a page, time on an app, but never see that flow through to conversion or re-engagement with a brand, my aperture of the world is so small. It’s not holistic,” says Bale.
• There also needs to be what Abaryan calls a universal “language for performance” across all channels, “where you can look at what drives your business in terms of the natural demand — so, your baseline distribution, what the competition is doing, what the market is doing".

Align Teams Around Tangible KPIs

• Measuring methods such as marketing mix modelling offer a host of KPIs to analyse, which are not always complementary and can ultimately be problematic when different functions focus on tracking different metrics.
• The key is aligning the organisation around which KPIs are the priority to track for the business at that moment.
• At Ekimetrics, the company’s full-funnel, multi-stage measurement framework incorporates brand health metrics across the entire marketing funnel to evaluate long-term brand building.
• This interconnected ecosystem allows brands to capture the intended impact of marketing on the right KPIs, while still being able to look at everything holistically with a final sales KPI.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by Ekimetrics as part of a BoF partnership.