The pandemic has accelerated the need for brands to deliver strong personalized digital experiences.
Achieving one-to-one marketing at scale relies on a data-driven approach. At Brand Innovators recent Data-Driven Marketing at Scale livecast, leading marketers from Bloomberg, Canva, Marriott and Del Taco talked about how they are growing their businesses through data-driven marketing.
Engaging consumers when they are in the information-gathering stage can help brands find new customers.
“For me, I have grown up in both brand and performance marketing spaces and I am a big believer in ‘brand drives demand’ but doing brand in the right way helps to drive demand,” said Chris Marino, Global Head of Performance Marketing & Media, Bloomberg Media. “I am very passionate about making the right levels of investment in upper and mid funnel marketing initiatives knowing that’s where the scale and opportunity exists to drive consideration and ultimately, using that scale to bring someone down the funnel and drive a really efficient conversion. There are only so many hand raisers and our job is to grow demand for the long term.”
Measurement is key to understanding if a marketing tactic is working and allows brands to optimize their campaigns.
“I always believe in carving out 20% of experimental budget and I encourage my team to dedicate 20% of their time to thinking about innovation,” said Sunil Subhedar, Head of Growth Marketing at Canva. “We also have a dedicated team just thinking about new channels and new channel growth, where the objective is to design that channel to create it to an evergreen scale. We have these milestone gates which are: 1. Is this something that you can scale from a campaign automation perspective? 2. Is there a way that you can scale it from a globalization perspective? How many markets can you actually distribute this channel into? 3. Is it measurable? With nascent channels like podcasts or even programmatic audio, that can be quite challenging in normal attribution so you actually have to build some safeguards in place to learn and test. Over time, you have to actually figure out how to measure and incorporate it into your attribution models.”
When the pandemic hit. Marriott International suffered its worst quarter ever with revenues down 80%, year-over-year, and 25% of hotels completely closed. The company has focused on its data-driven approach and in Q2 had their best quarter since with hotel capacity back to nearly half full.
“Organizationally, we are continuing to prepare for an uncertain future,” said Holly Waisanen-Hatipoglu, Vice President of Loyalty Analytics, Marriott International. “There continues to be a lot of optimism. Marriott is a fantastic brand, a long legacy company. Travel is going to come back. There is still a lot of middle class income out there, a lot of desire and demand for travel, but we are not quite sure when that is coming. There is certainly an uncertain future ahead. That has made it harder for us as forecasters, and data users to be able to predict what we think is next, and how we take advantage of that. And frankly, from an organizational perspective, it has also meant that in the future we are preparing to do more with less, a restructuring from an organizational perspective and some restructuring in terms of our budget capacity to be able to make these really big tech investments.”
Del Taco has been improving its data-driven approach over the last year focusing on integrating technology with its loyalty program.
“I love data,” said Erin Levzow, Vice President of Marketing Technology, Del Taco Restaurants. “The classic questions of ‘what does someone know about me and how could it be best used?’ – it’s technically ethical hacking, what we’re able to do with it and how we can use the data in a positive way. What we’re seeing is marketing technology and marketing as a whole say ‘let us be the platform’ and ‘let us house this information’. You don’t see a lot of restaurant companies out there saying ‘let’s use marketing technology’ it’s usually one or the other. We have a lot of technology and we are ever-evolving, ever-changing, ever gearing up for new things.”
