1. What percentage of a brand’s marketing spend must go digital according to you?
I think they should be setting aside around 25% to 40% of their budget for digital marketing. There is increasing pressure on marketing departments to document and demonstrate their impact on top-line growth, so brands need to examine how their marketing budgets are allocated (eg, marketing technology, creatives).
2. What can offline advertising not achieve for you that only digital can?
Sharp targeting to scale, personalization, and instant measurability.
These, for me, are what give digital ads an edge over their offline counterparts.
We’ve been in the digital age for quite a while now, but the pace at which digitization penetrates every minute aspect of our lives has dramatically picked up in the last few years. One inescapable part of this development is, unsurprisingly, the explosion of data. To be sure, offline advertisements are informed by data—in their research, conceptualization, and deployment. The issue, however, is that brands will struggle to churn out ads of significant variety and volume simply because of the format’s practical limitations.
With digital ads, the path from ideation to launch to performance assessment is a far shorter one. Brands can leverage, for example, A/B/n testing to optimize their ad selection, and analytics tend to become available without an extended delay. Since digital ads are delivered through online channels, they open up the space for brands to map their customers’ digital behavior, devise journeys that crisscross varied touchpoints, and attribute conversion in a far more concrete manner.
Sure, an instantaneous boost in footfall across physical branches after a billboard campaign can be an indicator of its quality, but we’re talking about more specific metrics. “X number of visitors clicked on ad A and converted.” None of this is to downplay the many innovative physical ad campaigns—in the form of eye-catching popup shops and immersive installations, for example—but we should still note that in many instances, even these “offline” advertising efforts are shot through with the online. QR codes, AR, VR, IoT, and other technologies have precipitated the blurring of the online-offline boundary, so it’d be exciting to see what innovations brands create in the future.
3. How does your offering with Google differ from that of other marketing technology companies?
In essence, our solution, Google Cloud Ad Data Platform (GCDAP), integrates Resulticks’ CDP engine with a suite of Google tools—Google Cloud, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ads Data Hub—so organizations can tap into a richer reservoir of data , get more complete insights on their ad performances, and target with greater precision. We’re trying to give marketers a more streamlined experience of orchestrating, monitoring, and analyzing their search ads.
GCADP is a specialized tool, focusing on Google ads. That trait is what separates it from our full-stack solution, which really encompasses all aspects of omnichannel customer engagement, or, say, a mobile marketing tool from another vendor,
Our solution has a very specific area of application. However, it is our hope that this coming together of Google’s industry-defining, cutting-edge ecosystem and our technology will bear fruit in the form of other exciting offerings for organizations worldwide.
4. Lots of confusing terminologies are circulating about marketing effectiveness. What best captures what the market needs?
Before we talk about the metrics by which marketing effectiveness is measured, it’s worthwhile to note some of the foundational factors on which everything rests.
The most obvious one is data. Brands now have at their disposal large swathes of valuable, real-time data. All the data in the world, however, cannot move a brand forward if it lacks the capabilities to unify, clean, augment, and activate the information in an actionable manner and with a focus on the individual customer.
Next, when trying to assess the performance of digital marketing efforts, brands need to look at the whole journey of their audiences—from unknown visitors to prospects to customers, from QR codes to mobile to web and beyond. Every part of this whole constellation matters, and being able to take it all into account will be crucial to an accurate understanding of how marketing is doing. In turn, this should push marketing teams to consider how CX, marketing strategies, and martech can blend together to contribute to all these different touchpoints and phases.
Now, coming back to the question of metrics, return on investment (ROI) would be the easiest pick. It comes up in our conversations with brands across almost all industries. C-suite leaders really want to get a reliable idea of their ROI, and it seems that many of the solutions have simply failed them. So, attributing ROI precisely is very important.
ROI alone cannot capture all that a marketer needs to evaluate their marketing campaigns, of course. Customer lifetime value (CLV), for instance, is useful for prioritizing audience segments that will generate the most top-line impact. If incorporated into a marketing automation solution, CLV can help sharpen audience targeting at scale. The ratio of lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC), is a key dimension to the LTV metric.
There are many metrics. To find the ones that are right for them, brands should cleave through the smoke of new terminologies and consider whether they designate anything of actual relevance.
