We continue the 2021 Reflections series on Outside In, with Insights focused on the field of Performance Marketing. Taking a consumer from the consideration phase to the final conversion is the goal of every marketer. While ATL advertising mediums have always helped in creating a strong recall, the digital medium today holds the key in attracting the customer in the consideration phase. This is where Performance Marketing comes in…big time. Brands across categories are utilizing performance marketing techniques for gaining user conversions, maximizing ROI and quantifying marketing success
A) Impact of Performance Marketing
Simply speaking, it allows brands to make their campaign spends more efficient with less money wastage and more revenue. It creates a customer journey which – instead of focusing on a brand’s awareness – is designed to guide the consumer’s attention on taking an action to engage with a brand – be it a click, subscription, sale or download
Depending on the stage of consumer journey, brands can ideate and decide on campaigns which can improve performance of their marketing investments. This framework below can be a useful guide in this pursuit and help chase the right metrics for the same:
B) Opportunities in Performance Marketing
Enables Intersections of Data and Science – A brand’s overall performance and final conversions depend on unique proposition of integrating data at each intersection of user engagement and behaviour. From CRM data to call centre conversations to website chats, each unique data set provides with enhanced knowledge for converting engaged users into a buying customer and improves the user activation journey
Game Changer for App Marketers – Performance marketing is very useful for App Marketers, as it lets them distribute their ad spends efficiently – focused on specialized audience segments and optimizing campaigns for post-install events – spanning the complete lifecycle of a consumer on the platform. This helps them generate higher returns for their overall ad spend
Content Drives Performance Marketing – Using influencers and content on websites, this route of performance marketing involves using a dedicated post, article or videos promoting a specific brand or a product – in return for some rewards. The rewards can be in the form of samples or experiences, while sometimes it is a CPA, CPM or CPC-based payout
Facilitates Affiliate Programs: Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. The affiliate simply searches for a product they enjoy, then promotes that product and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make. The sales are tracked via affiliate links from one website to another. Because affiliate marketing works by spreading the responsibilities of product marketing and creation across parties, it manages to leverage the abilities of a variety of individuals for a more effective marketing strategy while providing contributors with a share of the profit
C) The Cycle of Performance Marketing – SEO, SEM and Beyond
Tarun Jha, Head – Marketing, Skoda Auto: Skoda chased 2 kinds of KPIs through Performance Marketing – First was brand building, where brand awareness was looked at. Second was brand familiarity because Skoda was a niche brand in India. The other core sales related KPIs were lead generation and test drive requests. These are KPIs the brand chased through their campaigns
Jahid Ahmed, Head – Digital Marketing, HDFC Bank: SEO and SEM are the main characters of a Performance Marketing program. SEO is built over a period of time. So, the brand cannot do much testing in terms of which keyword they should go for in terms of ad texts, meta tags or title descriptions. Here, SEM gives a quick feedback on which keywords to target, for the brands know which ad texts are really working well. So that means, those ad texts can be considered as a good title description and meta description
Mayur Pathak – Omnichannel Commerce Lead, Titan: Titan used 1st party data, collected over last 3 years, and put it into a single view of a customer. They used Salesforce to aggregate all their data and are now getting into the next stage of implementing a CDP (Customer Data Platform) to better run their online campaigns
Rohit Dosi, Director, Microsoft Advertising: It is important for brands to be present across multiple channels and ensure they are engaging with their customers (wherever they are present). For marketers, it is important to have a centralised view of their customer’s journeys and what they were doing at multiple Touchpoints
Here’s an Illustrative Snapshot of what a Performance Marketing Cycle can look like:
D) The Intersection of Data and Marketing Technologies
Gone are the days when performance marketers used to look at impressions, clicks, website visits and so on. With the advent of new platforms and technologies, performance marketing now needs more rigor than ever to include display video, audio search, programmatic mails and SMS, influencers, dynamic creatives, attribution and modelling. These are inseparable components that enable delivery of best user experiences that are smooth, non-intrusive and also deliver results
Navin Madhavan, VP & GM, Growth Marketing Platforms, InMobi: There’s been a lot of innovation and advances in measurement technology and platforms, which has helped the ecosystem recognize attribution and outcomes in a truly privacy compliant fashion
Abhishek Gupta, SVP, Growth (D2C Business), Mamaearth: To make sure the brand features on the top organic results, SEO plays a key role. One of the key mistakes most companies make is that they adopt a SEO strategy after 3-4 years. We have learned that we need to start from the beginning itself and are currently expanding our SEO strategy towards non-brand keywords
Prathamesh Dembla, Head of Growth, Licious: When brands are looking for inorganic growth, video is the future. We did an analysis with certain cohorts of users, video is one the biggest contributors for performance acquisitions today. We have seen our categories or category P&L changing drastically because of 1-2 films out there
Samriddh Dasgupta, VP Marketing & New Brands, Bombay Shaving: Before we establish whether celebrity or influencer marketing works for us or not, we need to establish what problem we want them to solve for us. For us, the cost of acquisition goes down, the brand recall goes up, the search trends are phenomenal and we are able to get the richness of audience and remarket to them
Arun Jayraman, Head – Marketing, Big Basket: We measure things like intent of a user, based on multiple factors like time spent on app, engagement and all the regular default factors. Outside of that, they look at propensity to purchase. They have derived metrics with the help of their data science team to figure out who is more likely to buy and then we use more budgets for that cohort of users
E) App Store Optimization (ASO)
Advit Sahdev, VP Marketing, CoinDCX: App Store Optimization (ASO) is one of the key things they focus on, as a platform. Time spent inside the app – and there are ways by which consumers can spend more and more time in the app – is a very relevant factor for pushing ASO. Most of their focus goes on monitoring In-app Usage and increasing the Conversion Numbers. Tracking customer journey via in-app metrics is important from app install to sign-up to first deposit rate
Priyang Agarwal, Director, Marketing, Partnerships & Growth, 1mg: ASO or SEO, or any other channel, is a continuous process no matter what stage of the business one is in. It is not only about getting the rank up on Google search but also about good reviews and ratings. When an app is getting a good review on the app store, Google understands that the app is enjoying popularity and they push the app up on their rankings
Rana Vishal Singh, Head of Growth Marketing, Josh (Daily Hunt): ASO has been looked upon as an incremental initiative by performance marketers with a ‘hackish’ approach. They are always trying to load their app names with a lot of keywords so that they can start ranking upwards. But it may not really play out well for large consumer brands. Also, performance marketers tend to look at traffic as new user traffic and often forget that there are a lot of reinstalling users who are part of it as well
Karan Lakhwani, Head – BD, AppTweak: ASO maintains the general health of the brand or the app and it must viewed as a holistic practice at the end of the day. One of the biggest challenges that app marketers currently face is that of attribution. Is an install coming from a paid source or an organic source is a big question?
F) Importance of Content for Performance Marketing
It has become important for brands to develop new content formats, to engage audiences by creating immersive experiences for consumers that refine consumer journeys. With the amount of content available to consumers today, it is easy to estimate that consumers will overlook ads that do not connect with them. This has meant that marketers must lean towards targeted and immersive advertising that looks and feels more organic to consumers
Shivam Ranjan, Head – Marketing, Motorola: The importance of content has obviously grown in overall digital marketing, because there has been a rapid rise in the number of brands and participation for consumer mindshare, in the digital ecosystem. Curating content for new platforms is a must. If brands drive consumers directly to product page – where the consumer just needs to check out the product, the conversion rates are far lower that if he is first directed to a store page that he actually spend time on exploration
Kapil Ohri, Head – Digital Marketing, Dabur: The attention span of consumers has gone down to 6-7% and all marketers are fighting for this attention span. Short format or long format – it must work to capture the insight and attention of the consumer – it is the most critical ask of content creation
Swagata Palharya, Business Lead-India, Snap: The basic tenet of content marketing is to create a (memorable) messaging, which resonates with the audiences; not just to grab eyeballs, but to create an engagement
G) Nuances of Affiliate Marketing – Ishan Bose, CEO, Kreditbee:
When one talks about paid and self-attribution platforms like Google and Facebook, these are a platform that do attribution themselves and that is how they charge marketers – denoting the impact of the scale. These channels give a larger control to the advertiser with respect to the input. These platforms have huge amount of owned inventory. The larger the owned inventory, the easier it is to control the targeting at the advertiser’s end
When it comes to affiliate platforms, the idea is to look at certain cost models to get started (basis an advertiser’s objective). For instance, if one starts with a cost model that is heavy on the top of the funnel, it might not give a huge control on the middle or bottom of the funnel
Reliance on Affiliates must be considered since one cannot rely only on Google & Facebook all the time. It will be akin to putting all eggs in one basket. Every channel will have its own limitations to provide the right kind of scale at the right cost
Affiliate Marketing comes into play when a) paid platforms become hugely expensive, b) advertisers pursuing variety in terms the kind of advertising they want to do, the kind of platforms they want to target and the kind of user they want to target
H) Takeaways from Ferns ‘N Petals (FNP) – Pawan Gadia, CEO:
FNP doubled its online revenue in the last three years and has a very strong loyalty with over 60% repeatability of customers. Reportedly, it is India's largest flower and gifts retailer and one of the world’s largest flower retailers. The brand engages customers in the following touchpoints: online properties – websites, the app; call-centre (across the channels of phone, email, chat, etc.), offline stores, the marketing touchpoints – email, push notifications, SMS, etc., and the customer data platform (CDP) that the company has built internally
Over the last few years, performance marketing has gotten democratized whereby everyone now uses the same tactics to accelerate growth. Because of this, the cost per lead (CPL) or traffic has become very expensive. If it is not done well – getting the cost of acquisition (CAC) right – it can become a reason for some organizations to perish
Unless performance marketing actually performs, and we do not get customers through the same channel again, it becomes a waste
Tip to create a Sustainable Marketing Budget: Is your data strategy robust, to create a 1st party database? Lots of ads that we see on the web (today) are driven by 3rd party cookies that track your data including your personal identity. Since they are phasing out soon, it is important to cultivate your own database and ensuring customer engagement through remarketing and retention techniques
Marketing is one of the biggest costs of a company’s P&L and marketers have to be careful in spending this budget. Performance marketing spends for some brands/organizations have reached 30% of the topline revenue. It is easy to get discount-hunting customers and difficult to get customers via organic growth. To pursue this objective, marketers must work with the product management team
I) Automation Tools for Improving Performance Marketing Process – Krish Kidao, Affise Technologies
80% brands today use partner marketing solutions because they want to improve their performance campaigns and ROI. And there has been a consistent 25% growth in the number of martech companies emerging every year in the last few years. Automation in Performance Marketing helps marketers control traffic, reduce errors/fraud and increase the advertisers and publishers’ (read: affiliate marketing partners) confidence (in their campaigns). Some of the Automation Tools which can be adopted are:
Smart Targeting Tools: Define and set up offers based targeting metrics like geography (Country/City/Location) (E.g. Audiense for Twitter)
Conversion Rate (CR) Automation Tools: Control metrics by setting up an optimal range and if the numbers fall outside the range, the traffic source gets passed automatically (E.g. Google Analytics, Browserstack)
Click Automation Tools: Use this tool to automatically keep an eye on campaign and click volumes (E.g. Click Dimensions with MS Dynamics)
KPI Automation Tools: Evaluate how attractive an offer can be in the eyes of the end user and how effective is the traffic for the same (E.g. Millimetric)
In Conclusion
Rahul Seth, Co-founder, Burger Singh: For newer and smaller brands competing with the big daddies in their sector, performance marketing comes in as an equalizer of sorts. “In a world where there is no digital marketing, the hoarding that a Burger King would be able to put up on a highway would be a lot bigger than a sign that I would be able to put up. It (performance marketing) has opened up the field of competitive advertising and made it accessible to brands that are just starting off”…
In 2019, the brand has chosen offline branding and had connected with one thousand auto rickshaws in Delhi-NCR. It has also collaborated with apps such as Inshorts and Saavn to advertise the same campaign on the digital medium. The offer, that was planned to run throughout the year, was also available on all food delivery apps and in select dine-in outlets
To summarize, a consumer is thoroughly researching every product before purchasing it. They want the right answers, a list of the right products, at the right time, in the right order at the stage of shopping journey he is in. It is every performance marketer’s mandate to deliver these right answers, in order to succeed. To this effect, brands must spend on (say) sponsored content, app marketing, SEO, SEM, app store, affiliate marketing, etc. to ensure that the brand is the first among to be present whenever the consumer is searching for it
References and Sources:
1. Notes from Performance Marketing Summit 2021
2. Opportunities in Performance Marketing: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-tapping-a-brands-journey-from-clicks-to-conversions-in-the-digital-era/87040502
3. Ferns ‘N Petals Takeaways: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-keynote-address-by-pawan-gadia-ferns-n-petals/87150286
4. Ferns ‘N Petals Revenue Growth: https://www.indianretailer.com/article/technology/profiles/how-ferns-n-petals-has-doubled-its-online-revenue-in-3-years.a7572/
5. FNP Sale Offer Example: https://www.upto75.com/Ferns_N_Petals/m/5442/Sale_Offer.html
6. Affiliate Programs: https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/affiliate-marketing/
7. Performance Marketing – Funnel, Metrics: https://neilpatel.com/blog/performance-based-marketing-win/
8. Automation Tools: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-how-automation-improves-your-performance-marketing/87157293
9. Foundation – SEO, SEM: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-the-holy-grail-of-seo-and-sem/87157016
10. Performance Marketing Cycles: https://velitdundar.medium.com/performance-marketing-redefined-af31125b83bb
11. Nuances of Affiliate Marketing: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-nuances-of-affiliate-marketing/87155604
12. Importance of Content: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-the-growing-importance-of-content-to-drive-performance/87155353
13. App as a Game Changer: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-a-game-changer-for-app-marketers/87153529
14. Intersection of Data & Marketing Technologies: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-2021-the-intersection-of-marketing-technologies-and-data-science/87151957
15. Burger Singh on Performance Marketing: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/performance-marketing-summit-why-growing-brands-need-performance-marketing/87152935; 1/- Fries Campaign on Digital Mediums: https://www.afaqs.com/news/mktg/burger-singh-woos-young-foodies-with-re1-fries