A post COVID digital surge has made effective performance marketing critical to brand building

Authored by Udit Verma, CMO, Co-founder of Trackier

From the way people work to the way they buy their essentials, COVID 19 pandemic has brought about lasting behavioural shifts among the population at large. While inducing a greater switch towards digitization, this shift has also deeply impacted the marketing and branding strategies of organizations. Not only have brands moulded their messaging to suit the needs of these sombre times, they have also been forced to shift away from traditional marketing tactics to adopt more evolved ways to reach out to consumers and deliver value to them.

As traditional ways of consumer outreach shrink, television ads become less impactful and people spend more hours online, the scramble to grab consumer eye digitally has also increased. If you are one of those people who spend long hours surfing social media and other digital channels, you may have noticed a rising stream of sponsored ads as well as a series of eye grabbing marketing strategies deployed by brands online. This increasing competition is also making brands feel the need for a more calibrated and targeted approach to marketing and online advertising – an approach that bears results and makes every rupee spent on marketing count! This is exactly why performance based marketing has gained greater steam in recent times. Advertisers and marketers now increasingly want to pay marketers or publishers for conversions, not just for posting ads.

COVID 19 and its impact on brand marketing

The impact of COVID 19 on online traffic has been staggering over the past year.According to an estimate,online transactions had increased by 39.7 percent in January 2021 as compared to January 2020, with the global conversion increasing by a little over 40percent. According to an analysis conducted by Nokia, with Indians spending roughly five hours daily on a smartphone their average monthly data usage per user grew by 20% year-on-year in December,2021. This online shift has significantly boosted the already high growth of the consumer internet sector in India and it is now predicted to grow by as much as four times over the next half a decade. A Survey by UNCTAD conducted across nine countries concluded that the pandemic had changed online shopping behaviours for good, with over 50% respondents indicating that they were now shopping online more frequently and relying on the web more than ever before for news and entertainment.

Not just increased traffic, this digital surge has also brought about an increase in consumer awareness, forcing marketers to consider new more targeted strategies to grab their attention and establish a lasting footprint on their minds – essentially what brand building is all about. On the one hand, brands have been faced with the need of crafting more intelligent, considerate and engaging ad campaigns; on the other hand they are experiencing the need to improve their audience segmentation and campaign targeting strategies. With an economic crunch putting greater onus on brands to achieve more ecommerce conversions, digital marketing strategies now need to be more data-driven, measurable and customised to the needs of different target consumers. Brands do not just need ad campaigns from marketers, they need ad campaigns that have better conversion and impression rates! This is where performance based marketing is increasingly becoming more relevant and advanced performance marketing solutions like Trackier are attracting an increasing stream of brands.

Performance based marketing gains greater hold

Performance marketing is a relatively new and innovative way of accomplishing ad campaigns online, based on the premise that marketers shall be paid after a positive performance is achieved, rather than being paid before the results. The benefits of performance marketing include targeted and customised campaigns that give trackable positive results and high ROI.

The advent of new age digital tools has brought about a complete digital transformation of marketing. Advanced tracking and automation tools and the power to make sense of tonnes of data gives brands a highly effective route to optimise their marketing strategies and amplify their business footprint. Evidently, in this emerging business scenario, marketing and brand building can no longer be placed in silos. Rather, brand marketing becomes an inseparable part of the larger digital marketing approach.

Performance based marketing helps brands achieve the twin targets of optimising marketing resources while achieving the right brand outreach. In fact, Performance Marketing can be regarded as an amalgamation of paid advertising with brand marketing strategies, which pays publishers only when a desired action is accomplished. The desired action may range from a series of positive conversions from an imprint including a generated lead, a completed sale or an impression that lands the consumer to your website. The ability to track your campaign success and gauge deep insights into consumer behaviour through Big Data has made performance marketing highly accurate and actionable.

In many ways, performance marketing can be regarded as the new benchmark in advertising. By paying marketers after the ad campaign succeeds lays ground for a more targeted and motivated approach to marketing, forcing marketers to launch more researched and customised campaigns.