Unlocking the Power of Target Marketing with Vinod Thadani

In conversation with Social Samosa, Vinod Thadani, Chief Digital Officer, Mindshare talks about the importance and relevance of Target Marketing in the new normal. 

The impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent phases of lockdown and unlock have made brands and marketers rethink it all. How to keep the communication going even when you know you can’t service the consumers? Would consumers be willing to spend while being under so much stress? Why should our brand be the one they choose? Which geographies should be targeted as things start to normalise? These are perhaps just a few among the million questions that have crossed the minds of marketers. Vinod Thadani, Chief Digital Officer, Mindshare shares his experience of braving the heat and how Target Marketing will become more relevant than ever in the post-COVID-19 world. Vinod Thadani, Chief Digital Officer, Mindshare shares his experience of braving the heat and how Target Marketing will become more relevant than ever in the post-COVID-19 world. 

“If I have to go back to when this entire thing started, the supply chain, the factories, consumer behaviour, preferences and media mix, everything changed. We are all living in times where we saw all of this happening. Hence, we also had to become pretty agile in our strategy and offerings to our brands,” he explains.

The next phase of change was when unlock began. This is where deployment strategies had to be rethought across different levels of geographies. “At any given time of time, wherever the city was opening, we had to make sure our advertising was relevant to that particular city and geography and pin code to ensure they were outcome-based,” he explains. 

He feels the trick lies in going from a broad audience to more specific ones. To target advertisements with such precision that there is no wastage. For doing so, there are clear measurement models that Mindshare has been deploying for their clients. “It's always on-ground action rather than putting up strategy charts and explaining how your evolution would be,” he says. 

Thadani further dwells on the specifics of the strategy: “Get into the brief, make sure you have clear KPIs from the client, work on those KPIs with your team on how you will deliver those KPIs, target better, segment audiences better, have relevant communication and personalisation. Check how you will be mapped in regards to the success of the campaign.”

Attribution and analytics are becoming two key parts of the entire journey.

“You need to understand and attribute what your dollar spends were and how you can take it back to sales and whether you can link both,” he adds. 

Across sectors, brands are at a different data maturity curve. Some of the brands that are pretty up in the data-driven marketing curve include those who belong to the consumer tech, Edu tech, BFSI, FMCG sectors.

You can watch the entire session here: