There is a dramatic decline taking place in traditional business models, which has been initiated by prolonged lockdowns from the global corona virus pandemic. That caused big and small clients alike to change their approach to digital. The focus has shifted from an earlier digital economy viewpoint that focused on driving awareness – given footfall parameters were healthy and stable in brick-and-mortar locations to complete a purchase – to one that is now closely connected to e-commerce or in-app shopping platforms’ ROI. Automotive brands such as AGMC and Nissan, for example, have a fully embraced e-commerce presence where a user can literally buy a car online and pay for it the same way they would buy groceries online.
Amid the shrinking budgets of clients, it is time for performance marketing, which we also call ‘Precision Marketing’.
That is where performance tools and customer-focused audience profiles are helping create more accurate ROI-focused solutions for clients. Those clients have had access to rich first party data for a long time, but were not able to bridge it with the digital ecosystem touchpoints that they relied on in their marketing plans with their existing digital agencies. Now, tools capable of using the first party data from physical stores and translating them in a way to connect with their userbase (and even to go further to do look-alike modelling) have filled a lot of gaps for the clients and making this digital transformation swift.
Working with leading data management platforms and customer data platforms (DMPs and CDPs), we are approaching the challenge of helping our partners’ business grow with two hats on. The approach
combines unifying customer data silos for our clients, while at the same time upgrading their path to e-commerce by creating the right connection points with social and search to ensure a seamless customer experience. The consumer journey starts in that same digital ecosystem that a brand offers while it is promoting offers on new customers there to only generate likes and engagement, it focuses predominantly on check-outs through online purchase. With the translation of the business models to
complete or semi e-commerce models, clients have to rely on more in-depth metrics now to gauge the performance of their marketing efforts. The clients need to focus more on the digital journey of a consumer and use detailed reports to understand the weak touchpoints in the consumer path to a sale or conversion.
A good example of how we are approaching ROI creation is our work for a major automotive dealer in the UAE. By building a precise profile for its most valuable target by nameplate, using their own first-party data, we were able to use their current digital ecosystem to target that group precisely and
lead them by hand to a dedicated e-commerce portal that was linked seamlessly with regional and global awareness landing pages. A year ago, that approach would have relied on the showroom
sales team to follow up and invite the customer for a test drive, but now a more singular path to purchase meets them at every touch point in that digital ecosystem, increasing the chances of them actually going for the down-payment option on the vehicle of choice. All interactions across that digital ecosystem lead the customer by hand towards a purchase, no matter what stop in
that ecosystem the customer was on.
Each industry is undergoing its own unique set of challenges. The key point is that the challenges these industries are facing can vary significantly based on the services or products provided to customers, where companies need to adapt to changes in consumer behaviour, be ready to bounce back stronger and outline a smarter marketing strategy.
The current situation we are facing requires every marketer to redesign their performance approach and develop ongoing experimentation to deliver an optimum customer experience, and understand how to build customer-centric performance strategies with a full end-to-end consumer journey approach.
This will only be possible with the right set of ad tech tools. By far the travel, hospitality and entertainment industries are among the worst hit by Covid-19 and probably the last ones to start
recovering. With our clients in this sphere, we are working to focus on what we call community-building with their ad spends. The reason for this is lower inventory costs and a surge in internet usage and average media consumption. We have changed the content strategies for these clients to be less ‘salesy’ and focus on metrics such as interactions instead. We started focusing on the new
reporting metrics and KPIs and saw overwhelming growth results for their digital assets across websites and social handles.
The most important thing for any industry in the current climate is to adapt to the situation and translate their efforts to achieve the objectives of marketing in the ongoing situation. In times like these, it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage
change. We at Boopin has been adopting to the latest ad tech tools globally, and invested heavily in numerous tools that will scale and provide continuous improvements to every aspect for our clients’ digital strategies to improve their performance marketing practices. We have utilised the tools to adapt to the change and are constantly learning to work with our clients to accomplish continuous success and come out of this crisis stronger and better.