They had all sorts of amazing things to say about strategy, creativity, messaging, personalisation and the way the evolving digital world is changing the way marketing works, all the time.
Me? I chose what appears to be the least sexy topic in the book — Performance Marketing — but I actually think it's fascinating, if only because people haven't gotten their heads around how astoundingly effective it is and how easily it can solve major marketing headaches if it's done properly.
Whether a client is looking at ROI (Return On Investment), ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) or ROMS (Return On Marketing Spend), there's one constant — they want to understand the return, because they're spending a lot of money and are often uncertain about whether what they're signing up for will be effective or not.
There's plenty of theory, lots of juggling and plenty of smoke, mirrors and sleight of hand that can be deployed in both conceptualising and executing a marketing campaign, but the thing that can't be obfuscated is the outcome. Performance marketing helps marketers and clients "join the dots between online platforms and tactics in order to make the sum of the parts operate in a way that drives significant return,", if I may quote myself.
Performance Marketing is taking Integrated Digital Marketing (IMC) and peering into its inner workings, making sure that all the elements are spinning in the right direction to deliver an output that is meaningful for the client. The pillars of this are paid media, organic channels, owned media and data. These should all work together — so when paid media is switched off, the campaign shouldn't stop. The paid media should drive enough interest that organic reach is sustainable. When a client has owned media space, it should be contributing to the campaign in a meaningful way and all of these elements of the machine are fed by the final pillar — data.
Why aren't more people grasping Performance Marketing?
The digital marketing industry is still relatively young — particularly in South Africa. A lot of clients are familiar with the term and know that it's supposed to be some massive driver of leads and sales — but don't understand the building blocks that are required to establish a platform that does so. It's hard to challenge your agency when you don't know what you don't know — especially if your agency doesn't entirely know how everything fits together. What we need is open and honest conversations. We can learn together and do tremendous things when we are able to talk about what we need to be successful — and build those elements together.
Let's use Temu as an example, the variable quality of their products aside. They have done no traditional advertising anywhere — there's no radio, TV, you won't see a street pole sign, an airport billboard or a taxi wrap. All they've done is PM the stuffing out of local digital media and everyone knows who they are. It hasn't been sexy, but they understand the principles of effective targeting, good UX and how to use data to help them better understand the people they're talking to. Love them or hate them, their strategy has been effective.
I'd like to see the book as a cheat sheet for industry newcomers, a reminder for seasoned marketers about the essence of the industry — and also as a dialogue starter between agencies and clients.
A CMO might know the granular elements of a digital campaign, but can't be expected to also understand how HTML, CSS and Javascript fit together to enable campaign elements. The agency knows what they need to run a successful PM campaign, but needs to convince the client to make some changes to put those pillars in place. It's about collaboration, not obfuscation. We're all after the same things — we want great work that gets people excited and does what it says on the box for the product or service we're marketing.
PM is all about creating a very narrow field of view that helps direct people to pick and buy things, when they see messages about the right things, in the right place, at the right time — but getting to that level of simplicity involves negotiating the complicated stuff and setting everyone up for success. Let's do that.
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*Image courtesy of contributor