[Guest Article] Digital Marketing: uniting performance and branding

By Frédéric Courtin, French Sales Director at ADventori, partners of the 2017 edition of Lengow Day.

In the 4 years since we started working with marketers, we have witnessed many online retailers change their communication strategies. Normally driven by performance, we are seeing more and more advertising campaigns being driven by branding objectives.

Similarly, retail marketers are rolling out their online shops and angling their digital communication strategies towards performance objectives.

These less structurally defined strategic changes make us ask ourselves about the need to pit branding and performance against each other. Thanks to technology, high and low funnel strategies can now be used together and feed the same thought: a unique brand strategy where the message changes depending on where the customer is in the buying process.

To meet business objectives use creative scenarios powered by data

While every advertising campaign carried out by an online retail advertiser is motivated by business objectives and addresses very precise KPIs, the fact remains that a consumer’s buying behaviour evolves and nowadays tends to be extended on multiple different points of contact.

For an e-commerce player to distinguish themselves and do quick conversions, they must not only be able to capitalise on their brand, security and trustworthiness for consumers, but also establish a personal relationship by sending them the most relevant message possible.

DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimisation) allows advertisers to personalise every impression based on the individual user and their context using different real time data feeds.

4 main groups of data sources are available to help make advertising campaigns more dynamic:

• Situational data, relative to the environment in which the web user sees the ad. Generally their geolocation or the weather, date and time are very useful for pushing destocking operations or unique promotions.
• Advertiser data, belonging to the advertisers themselves. This is mostly information about their offers (images, price, products, available stock) or about points of sale, but also data coming from their own customer knowledge. Adverts can therefore be personalised based on the segments identified by the advertiser’s DMP or their CRM base.
• User data, or 3rd party data, which corresponds to the knowledge that we have of an internet or mobile user. Often supplied by third parties, this data provides information on a user’s profile, their sociodemographic category, or their buying intentions.
• Publisher data which allows advertisers to contextualise the content of a banner ad to the site on which it is shown using the site’s data i.e. the category of pages visited, the site’s keywords, or the publisher’s DMP.

By using these different types of data, an advertiser can put a spotlight on their publicity campaigns and choose the precise message they want to send to each user, based on their business objectives. For example, they can:

• Integrate countdown clocks or available stock during special periods (Black Friday, Sales, Christmas…)
• Suggest different products based on a consumer’s affinity to certain products or their previous purchases (cross-selling or up-selling) and therefore take advantage of their customer knowledge through identified user segments
• Suggest creative and enriched retargeting, adapted to the user’s progress in the conversion tunnel, especially through the personalisation of offers and messages depending on what category they visited or what they have in their basket
• Contextualise the offer by sending an appropriate message based on the user’s search history on partner publisher sites, or corresponding to the content of their searched page

Depending on the advertiser’s problems and the strategy implemented, 100% of their product catalogue can be used to feed their campaign by using technological partners such as Lengow, or in the form of scraping and crawling on the fly set up by ADventori. The selection of offers can be modified, reduced or completed at any point during the campaign without impacting its run.

Whatever the campaign scenario, advertising customization allows online retailers to maximize engagement, while creating a true one on one conversation with the consumer across all formats and devices. This is what data-driven campaigns are all about: responding precisely to  KPIs defined by the advertiser and jointly supporting the reputation of their brand, all of which is essential nowadays.

Measurable and able to be optimised, the creation of a new performance lever

Along with the chosen scenarios and data, design is central to the campaign. To guarantee coherence and to capitalize on brand image, the design and composition of banners must be perfected down to the last detail. By testing different CTAs, different images and different taglines throughout the campaign, the advertiser is able to optimise performance. Multivariate tests allows them to link the footprint of each dynamic and creative element of the campaign to business objectives, and therefore continuously improve the advertising medium therefore the least well performing tracks can be discarded, to the benefit of the better performing ones.

In order to take digital performance a step further, every element of the campaign is optimised above the media performance: the banner’s content, 100% of the catalogue, and customer knowledge.  Digital advertising will be particularly relevant to online retailers planning to buy media, design and business objectives in one go, the dynamic adserving of data-driven campaigns allowing to exploit their full potential.