Data-driven digital marketing the new business reality?

PETALING JAYA: With the inevitable move towards embracing data, automation and analytics, the field of marketing is not spared from adapting to new business realities.

Ematic Solutions regional head of performance marketing Daniel Andrew Khong (pix) said unlike traditional or conventional marketing that is more engrossed in metrics such as impression and reach, the effectiveness of a data-driven digital marketing campaign is tied to its business aspects.

“With digital marketing, the dollars spent can be attributed to tangible outcomes such as revenue or customers acquired,” he told SunBiz in a recent interview.

Khong elaborated that by examining the margins and the outcome of a particular campaign, customers could calculate whether the campaign made economic sense or not.

For example, if a business spends RM100 to acquire a customer, who in turn purchases RM1,000 worth of products, it will translate into a ten fold return on investment.

“With data-driven marketing, we focus a lot on such calculations, making sure that the numbers make sense, instead of blindly spending.

“We would take into account historical results to forecast the amount of revenue generated when running Facebook or Google ads,” Khong said.

He also shared that another key focus in digital marketing is A/B testing, whereby the marketing campaign will run multiple variants concurrently to evaluate how each ad performs.

“The concept of A/B testing is very widespread, but when in data-driven digital marketing, it allows us to make sure that the numbers do makes sense.”

Furthermore, he said the A/B testing is also used in tandem with the marketing funnel model to identify the perfect message to give to the client at each different stage.

For instance, the acquisition stage focuses on educating customers on a particular product or service, while at the consideration stage, it could skew towards coupon codes or comparison with competitors.

“The numbers and growth forecasts derived from the digital marketing data are what startups present to their investors, who are expecting a certain growth rate, revenue and other data.”

Khong advised startups to look out for saturation points that would hinder their growth, a typical case would be when they want to expand beyond the Klang Valley to the rest of the country.

Speaking of the outlook for marketing, he said automation has become the norm outside Malaysia.

“In terms of algorithm, on platforms such as Facebook, it has started to be very automated, where the need of user input is decreasing. Instead of asking marketers who (exactly) they want to target, the algorithm does it for you and also picks out what creative works the best,” he said.

source https://www.thesundaily.my/business/data-driven-digital-marketing-the-new-business-reality-LX1918269