Crafting performance marketing strategies to scale up for web and mobile campaigns

The eighth edition of Adgully’s flagship event – DIGIXX Summit and Awards 2024 – got off to a scintillating start today amid the presence of who’s who of the Digital and Marketing Universe. Each year, DIGIXX has been raising the bar, recognising the visionary leaders and groundbreaking campaigns that are shaping the future of digital marketing. This year has turned out to be even more exciting, exploring the newest trends, strategies, and insights that are transforming the digital landscape.

The spotlight was turned on ‘Performance Marketing Strategies by The Marketers for Web and Mobile Campaigns’, a panel discussion that was chaired by Jatin Kapoor, Managing Director, Adsflourish. The distinguished panelists included:

Abhishek Chadha, Executive VP, Interactive Avenues

Archana Aggarwal, VP - Media, Airtel

Rachna Khanna, GM - Marketing, Balancehero India

Shitiz Dogra, Digital Marketing Leader

Urmesh Chandra, Head of Digital Marketing, Policybazaar.com

Yashash Agarwal, CEO & Co-Founder, Gamezop

Commencing the discussions, Jatin Kapoor noted that the world is moving into performance and the brand marketing budgets are growing day by day. He asked the panellists, “With the ever changing advertising landscape, how do you stay ahead of the curve and identify new performance marketing channels for your clients?”

Abhishek Chadha remarked, “The eco-system is fragmenting at a very fast pace. The consumer touchpoints are compounding every day. What we as brand marketers or brand custodians need to be vigilant of is what specific intervention points we can create. The three basic tenets are experience, content, and activation. Through these three pillars, you will be able to figure out how you can work to minimise your consumer journey from the start to the purchase. For instance, in the case of a website where an action needs to be taken, the consumer has to go to the website to buy a product or get details. So, UX sits right at the center of it.”

Continuing further, he said, “Performance is everything we see through and everything we run through. If we look at the experience from a UX perspective on how better we can get the user to convert, we can also look at CRO, on how best we can create those specific intervention points. In terms of content, the focus is on how best you can create that customized content across the consumer journey. So, with the data of somebody entering into a website, how effectively are you creating a customized creative journey for that person across the funnel? In the case of the third tenet – activation, more importance has to be given to machine learning, on how campaigns are optimized, and how AI has to be used to create performance deltas. We are sitting at a point in time, where the convergence is necessary between content experience and activation to give that 100% to performance. Everything boils down to a specific, action, uplift, offtake, and purchase of sort.”

Kapoor then asked Airtel’s Archana Aggarwal, “Since Airtel prioritizes customer experience as a brand, how do you ensure your performance marketing strategies for mobile campaigns balance aggressive acquisition with its seamless user journey?”

Aggarwal replied, “At Airtel, there are a couple of things that we look at. One is communication and the second is auditing, governance, and benchmarking right cohorts. In the case of communication, all of it goes through marketing/ branding. There are many brand guidelines and a lot of scientific thinking that goes behind the kind of communication that gets put out. Even the SMSes that we send out, which could be an acquisition channel or a recharge channel, go through behavioral science. People who are in brand and marketing have built that expertise over time. Secondly, we look at final acquisitions as targets and not look at them as just leads, because if we are looking at just a lead target by a platform, then you tend to get a lot of junk leads too. We convert everything to cost per acquisition and don’t leave at cost per lead, because the online acquisition cost is compared with the offline acquisition cost, but we have a huge machinery that is acquiring customers offline.”

According to Aggarwal, there is no point in spending money on a platform – online vs offline – if it is going to be much more expensive. There is a whole lot of feedback loop that keeps on happening in terms of the offline team. The fulfillment may not always happen online, sometimes it also happens offline. There has to be a feedback loop in terms of ensuring the quality of acquisition. The third part is this whole piece of governance because of constant measurement by platform, the kind of value in terms of acquisitions each platform is getting within online. If the customer journeys are not seamless, then even if you are doing a great job in terms of driving performance spending for online marketing, there is going to be a break.”

Kapoor then asked Balancehero India’s Rachna Khanna, “For B2C companies like TrueBalance, building brand awareness can be crucial alongside driving conversions, how do you integrate these goals into your mobile performance marketing strategies?”

Khanna responded by saying, “Four years back, when this category developed, and when we moved on as a brand which is a service provider, giving add-on services. It was all about conversion, acquiring customers and aligning them to what the product offerings are, and further building it from there. I think over the last two or three years, there has been a lot of focus on category, when it has come from a compliance perspective, even from the consumer needs perspective, there has been a lot of change that we have seen.”

“Brand awareness and conversion now are more like a parallel game. It works together for us. So, from a marketing strategy perspective, there is a lot more focus on content, which not only allows us to connect with the consumers, but also creates a lot of trust factor. So, in our category trust is important. Suddenly we are seeing this category growing 7x-8x in terms of volumes over the years. A lot of players have come up, and a lot of brands have tried working out on different kinds of formats and product offerings the products because suddenly this mushroom kind of a business grew up. So, it was the more critical for us,” she added.

“I think we are primarily focused on the content part, and over the years, we have focussed a lot more on our organic strategy. In the last two years, our organic strategy has built up the kind of awareness that we were looking for, more from the brand searches that we were doing for the brand-related keywords and it has given us a 3x volume growth. Our application volumes have gone 4x daily. I think it is about the reach and placing ourselves in the minds of the consumers, at the right time and the trust. It works together from a governance or compliance perspective, we are taking care of that aspect. From a consumer perspective, we are being more transparent to them about what we have an offering around. So that has been a change for us,” Khanna elaborated.

When asked to share how he has adapted performance marketing strategies for a client in a unique industry, Shitiz Dogra said, “We as marketers run on FOMO, so if one brand is not doing something we are doing, we get jittery on which agency they are working for, which product are they selling. Product is at the heart of it for a marketer. There are two kinds of products – one is the advertising product, and the other is my product, the audience I am bringing to. For understanding how this behaviour is panning out across these two eco-systems is the baseline. There is no single advertising product agnostic of the industry.”

Adding further, he said, “As you know, I come from the aviation industry and my job is to ensure that people travel as they want. In aviation, our objective is to bring people to the confederation stage, thus one has to be there where their target audience is, and that is where you need the understanding of the advertising product well. When I was in Google Office for a YouTube workshop we were discussing what kind of advertising products would work for different kinds of categories. Two to three years back, one of my friends was heading marketing for an OTT brand and I asked him what was working for him as he had a solid D2C charter, he said that Spotify advertising was working well for them to build top of the funnel, whereas for one of my friends who is in FMCG or is in F&B, the same strategy might not work for them. So, understanding the category product works well for them. Almost 25% of our paid revenues were coming from video campaigns, which will not work for some other categories. Once we were progressively investing in performance max, but conversions stayed the same. We were told that probably we are not increasing the demand to commensurate the product that we are selling in the market. Thereby they came up with a new product called demand gen. Also, not a single inventory works for every category.”

Kapoor next asked Policybazaar.com’s Urmesh Chandra, “Within a highly competitive insurance sector, how do you leverage performance marketing to stand out and acquire new customers for PolicyBazaar?”

Chandra quipped, “I come from a very boring industry! Nobody wakes up and says that they are going to buy insurance today – be it any type of insurance apart from car insurance. The first thing that we have to do is educate our users or consumers about why they need insurance, because even in India right now, the penetration is low from a life insurance or term insurance perspective. Firstly, we have to focus on educating the customers, and then we go behind them running our performance campaigns, whether it is an intended campaign which is keyword-led, a search campaign, or a display campaign. After so many years, our strategy is not about quantity anymore, it is only about quality, because I do not think in today’s times we have to explain to each other how we can get quantity, as anybody can get quantity on their digital platforms. So, quality has become one of the things, and our focus is also towards those things only that can bring quality to the platform. One of the things that we do on this side is that our focus is not only to run the performance campaigns but also to increase the free traffic to the website. Our composition of the total traffic is 80:20, so 80% is free traffic for us, and 20% is paid.”

When asked how affiliate marketers can factor in publisher-first thinking to maximise their ROI, Yashash Agarwal of Gamezop replied, “We operate multiple content / media properties, serving over 300 million ad impressions a month. There have been a few advertisers that we have worked with who stood out in this regard – and they did a few things to maximize ROI on our platform. I am sure all of you diversify your advertising spends – between agencies, programmatic, Google and Meta platforms and so on. Google and Meta don’t only deliver your ads within their own apps – they also run ads on publishers like us. If you analyse your spends on those platforms, some publishers must be standing out for you, and delivering strong ROI again and again. What I am going to suggest may not scale to a hundred publishers for you, but it makes sense to know your top 5 or top 7 publishers and work directly with them. “First, work with your top publishers on creatives. Research the demographics, interests, and content consumption habits of the publisher's audience and create ad content that complements the publisher's content and tone. “Second, get the publisher to have more skin in the game. For instance, we have seen a lot of innovation from fantasy sports apps. Repeat advertisers from that space moved from doing just CPI campaigns with us, to now doing CPI plus revenue sharing deals. It works for them, and it makes us want to prioritise those deals over others seeing as there’s more upside.”

He concluded, “In summary, the advertising funnel doesn’t always end at your agency or at Google and Meta. In many cases, it ends with publishers like us where end users see ads. Optimising your ad content, and working closely with publishers can have a large impact in driving better ROI on your ad spends.”