Author: Jonathan Parker, Managing Director, EMEA & APAC, Advertising Production Resources.
As countries across the globe transition into endemicity, the last two years have seen consumer behaviour pivot significantly towards content and advertising. According to the MAGNA Global Advertising Forecast, Asia Pacific advertising revenues are forecast to increase by 11.2 percent to US$235 billion in 2022, 25 percent above the pre-Covid spending level. As consumers shift towards a preference for digital engagement, marketers and brands are forced to re-innovate their marketing strategies to create relevant online content, like advertising and activities that engage the targeted customer. But innovation requires marketers to first take advantage of the wealth of data from their existing digital advertising campaigns. With mobile app tracking projected to reduce within the year, brands that are less impacted by this wave of customers opting-out can gain a significant revenue advantage. That is because by 2025, 20 percent of B2B companies will adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for marketing sales and digital commerce, which can support customer self-service purchases and build a frictionless digital experience.
Harnessing the Power of Data to Enhance Your Digital Campaigns
While it is the norm for brands to stretch their digital advertising budget across multiple channels such as social media, email marketing and digital advertising, it is imperative for marketers to have the tools for tracking the results on those channels. Firstly, the brand needs to identify what its digital advertising seeks to achieve. Getting data on the return-of-investment (ROI) is beneficial but it should not be limited to that. Other key performance indicators (KPIs) for instance, brand awareness, brand sentiment or brand discovery are vital for having an enhanced digital campaign. With enriched data, marketers could make informed decisions on the channels and devise appropriate and effective optimisation strategies. In addition, data harvested needs to result in insight into customer brand experience, the effectiveness of key messages and geographical areas in which advertising is the most effective. Collectively these data will prove fundamental for optimising marketing strategy.
In Malaysia, the big data analytics (BDA) market is poised to reach US$1.9 billion (about RM7.85 billion) in 2025, from US$1.1 billion in 2021 according to an IDC study commissioned by the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC). MDEC also noted that investments in BDA could help companies and brands expand their presence in Malaysia as a bedrock to regional and global operations. This growth in BDA will provide the right boost for SMEs to optimise marketing strategies moving forward, as only 98.5 percent of Malaysian businesses make up less than 25 percent of total expenditure in advertising.
Using First-Party Data to Strengthen Client Relationships
To have a successful digital advertising campaign, owning an ecosystem of first-party data is pivotal. First-party data extends the prospect of building a solid relationship with clients and serves as an identifier for activation across platforms. The ecosystem also supports the creation of customer profiles that are available throughout the customer journey and helps identify them across all channels. Having a personal relationship that is built on trust creates a sense of value and meaning which elevates the human experience.
Forrester’s Malaysia 2021 Customer Experience Index reported that customers that felt a stronger relationship with their banks will maintain their business with said banks. The survey also found that forty-one percent of customers who felt valued would remain as a customer and 69 percent would recommend their bank to family or friends. On the contrary, 14 percent of unvalued customers will not recommend the bank with only 10 percent staying on as a customer.
By cooperating with big tech such as Google and Facebook, brands often find it easier to build trust and customer confidence when using algorithms from first-party data. Brands need to be responsible for that data, and in return, provide value back to customers. For brands to expand data proliferation towards growth, they need to demonstrate trustworthiness through consent.
Making the Most out of Data
Prioritising data collected from past-produced content and campaigns will propel marketers to devise better strategies to drive business growth. As privacy laws become more regulated by governments, forming a strong relationship with customers and developing compliant methods of collecting data will give brands a competitive edge in terms of customer loyalty. Harnessing the power to analyse and collect data as well as evaluate and report metrics, businesses will position themselves to accelerate growth by optimising marketing spend and savings across their entire content creation ecosystem. With the wealth of data collected from past-produced campaigns, businesses in the region now have a massive opportunity to get engaged with their customers.
As data analytics capabilities improve daily, so must the understanding of the production demands required to effectively utilize this data through technologies like dynamic creative optimization (DCO). Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) is a form of programmatic creative that uses data aggregation techniques to alter the elements of a display ad based on the results of real-time split testing. However, it is imperative that firstly, the data fits into the creative brief. In programmatic creative practices, like DCO, data should lay the foundations for the entire campaign. The more informed the brief is, the more relevant the messaging - and all of its potential variations - will appear.
Programmatic creative is the most cost-effective when a large portion of the production work is completed at the onset, further incentivising the need to make data-based decisions when analyzing the audience and creating production briefs. These briefs - and what has informed them - should be communicated all the way down to the content creators, directors, and technologists. They need to build competency with the data just like marketers in order to make more informed decisions.
