Experts gauge the state of Performance Marketing & the roadmap ahead

Varied marketing tactics evolved in wake of the pandemic last year. With the help of a few industry experts at AliveNow presents SAMMIE Best Social Media Brands, the roundtable discusses the trends in performance marketing.

Performance marketing is also known as direct response marketing or ROI marketing, according to Nilesh Gohil, Chief Growth Officer, Sokrati. It is the purest form of result-oriented marketing and also quite mainstream for new-age brands, especially in these precarious times we are in. The panel discussed the various nuances of the ROI-based marketing phenomenon.

Speakers

Nilesh Gohil, Chief Growth Officer, Merkle Sokrati (Moderator)

Smita Murarka, VP - Marketing & E-commerce, Duroflex

Srivatsa Udupa, Director-Digital Marketing, Viu

Prajakta Rathe, AVP - Performance Marketing at SUGAR Cosmetics

Abhishek Seth, AGM Brand Marketing, Tata Sky

COVID-19 Impact on Digital Marketing

Sharing their views on the changing insights and techniques of marketing owing to the pandemic last year, Tata Sky’s Seth observed that the increase in digital marketing spends is quite visible.

“The digital transformation has never been met by anything else as much as by the pandemic. At organisation level, we have started leveraging Tata Sky’s digital platforms as core streams wherein 50% of our media spends have been shifted to digital. It has surfaced a lot of opportunities to also take the burden from other channels,” he added.  

For SUGAR Cosmetics, the pandemic has been a boon and a bane, both. Especially when working women started spending more time at home and got some free time at hand. The avenues opened for home care and personal care since there was more time at home.

According to Duroflex’s Muraraka, while the pandemic was unfortunate, it happened to be an opportunity or crisis for everyone. “At Duroflex, we call it the vaccine for our business and the category. The mattress was not the product consumers were interested in. The pandemic accelerated conversation around sleep. We invested big in digital advertising talking about sleep immunity and more of digital activation,” she added.

Innovation, the Key?

Talking about ROI-based marketing; Udupa suggests looking at opportunities that give you an untapped advantage on what you have done historically.

“TikTok essentially, when started out, we always wanted to be the early adopters and try out new things. In 2021 also, we want to build on it. Whatever techniques you are using on mediums like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter may not work on TikTok. It's more of a creative intensive platform but what it essentially gives you is access to people who are consuming a lot of content,” he said.

Also Read: Original Content vs Trending Format: The new social media paradox

Martech is the key

The panelists were of the view that going forward, understanding data points at each step of the consumer buying funnel and the brand journey is significant so that brands don't sound transactional. Hence, investing in new ways of understanding data and simplifying them to adopt new measures needs to be prioritized.

AliveNow SAMMIE Best Social Media Brands 2020-21 was brought to you by Society Tea, Storia, HQ, Godrej Aer.