In 2012, the potato chip brand Lay’s held a campaign called Do Us a Flavour. Lay’s essentially crowdsourced ideas for their new flavors through their Facebook page. It was expected that the campaign could deliver a sales bump of around 3%. To everyone’s surprise, when the dust had settled, sales rose by a whopping 12%.
Campaigns like this work not just because they are innovative, but also because they are well-managed or smartly-controlled. Having smart control over the marketing campaigns allows the brand to attract more businessworthy traffic from a larger potential pool. The Lay’s campaign, for example, was a success because:
- The marketing and product management could work together to bring engagement as well as add new flavors for the chips. This drove a rise in sales
- It used social media to reach a broader audience with a more targeted message
- Not to forget, the campaign was carried out in a manner that was extremely data-driven and outcome-focused.
An in-depth focus on analytics automatically delivers greater control. It goes without saying that businesses should aim for smart control in their campaigns. Here are a few crucial points to be aware of in that context.
- Technology
According to a survey conducted among Digital marketers across the globe, 41% are looking for people with Data Analytics skills, and 38% are looking for tech expertise.
It is safe to assume that brand marketers are relying more and more on technology. This is because a good knowledge of the right adtech solution-set can facilitate smart control over marketing campaigns. This is even more crucial in an era where consumers are spending more time online and exploring all manner of online influences.
For instance, we have conversational marketing technology that ensures scalable means of interaction between the organization and the customer. There is also technology to enable omnichannel Marketing and deliver a consistent marketing message across various channels.
Technology in marketing helps the business at least partially automate their marketing pipeline, thus, creating more room for innovation and agility in strategies.
The “smart” part in the smart-control, can be attributed to some of these technology domains:
- Machine Learning: Businesses are already enthusiastic about Machine Learning. Studies show that 75% of the companies are expected to invest in big data within the coming to years. The need for ML is not lost on marketing either. Machine learning technologies are helping organizations ensure better end-customer experience, which in turn helps businesses build trust with the customer, which attracts more traction and engagement for the brand. ML also helps organizations optimize the marketing content, and seek out unnecessary blind-spots for brand visibility and fix them, over time.
- Artificial Intelligence: There can’t be smart control without a scalable mechanism to gather, clean, process, analyze, and mine the massive volume of data that the modern-day organizations generate from customer interactions. AI-based tools can do just that. These tools are meant to refine marketing campaigns and maximize their expected result by making them more personalized. They can help the business find more suitable platforms for their PPC ads and drive better programmatic outcomes. Intelligent tools can draw useful correlations from past customer journeys. AI-guided web portals can enhance the experience for the attracted audience. They also help businesses distribute their campaigns over multiple channels with subtle changes to make them appropriate in the context in which they appear.
- RTB Technology: The real-time bidding (or RTB) mainly aids the automation of the bidding process of ads. With the plethora of options out there and the fog of near-war surrounding each online channel, it’s easy to back the wrong horse and drain your digital budget in the wrong place. The bidding process for advertisement required powerful insights; therefore, adopting robust RTB technology for this task can enable the business to bid faster and more efficiently. For instance, the pay per click ads needs to be managed meticulously. Bidding for the right amount at the right time can bring immense relevant traffic to your web properties. Do this right, and within seconds you can populate the right channels with personalized ads about your brand for significant impact.
- Analytics: Analytics focuses on the unique insights that can drive optimized performance. Working with various agencies across multiple channels, it can be difficult for the CMO and brand managers to effectively measure the results of their efforts. Therefore, marketing analytics solutions ensure that there are useful metrics that can give meaningful patterns to help drive future marketing decisions. Moreover, these technology measures also ensure that the data collected from different sources and channels is organized and presented so that the concerned teams can have all the required views at a single place. Such consolidated views are more helpful for the stakeholders to make informed decisions for future marketing without getting drowned in a lot of noise.
- Transparency
There’s no doubt that brand marketers must have transparent real-time visibility into their campaigns. The pricing data, the ad placement, the campaign results, everything should be available upfront. This is an extremely dynamic world, so the current situation’s visibility must drive more informed decisions while buying ads. This suggests that the demand-side platforms employed to aid the ad buying process should be transparent with their information. There is a lot of fraud out there. Transparency is key to driving confidence in digital strategies, platform performance, and future outcomes.
- Ease of Use
Another essential point in attaining smart control over marketing campaigns by leveraging technology is the ease of use. This is not the time to burden marketers and brand managers with an extra layer of complexity over their ongoing business processes. All technology and platforms should be intuitive and easy to use. They should help the marketers focus their energy on the creative aspects and equip them to make smart decisions. The automation of redundant tasks, easy to understand insights, smooth connectivity, collaboration, comprehensive reports, and strategies visibly aligned with the business vision is required for the business stakeholders to be able to deliver impactful marketing campaigns. Complexity creates conflict, and conflict weakens control.
Smart control doesn’t slow down a marketing campaign. It makes it more targeted, which increases the chances of success. It’s a way to stay on top of what is happening in order to ensure that the campaigns generate the desired ROI.
