Three experts offer their top tips on how to market a company.
Paul Wright, Managing Director UK, FR, ME and Turkey at AppsFlyer
With vaccines being rolled out across the UAE, businesses have started the work of rebuilding for the ‘new normal’. For many, this will include reclaiming lost ad spend and adapting their marketing strategy to navigate new challenges.
At a time when brands are still taking a hit to their marketing budgets or possibly just starting to recover from cuts, it is more important than ever they minimise costs and tap into innovation and creativity to drive growth. But this can feel overwhelming when your budget is limited – how to start, where to begin?
A great example is Snapchat, which has debuted its first brand-facing campaign – using innovation and creativity to draw advertisers’ attention to its ad products. The Snapchat campaign was created in-house with a limited budget, with the innovative decision to target marketers directly for the first time in a B2B campaign. Snapchat’s parent company experienced a tough quarter in which brands cut spend because of COVID-19 restrictions; attracting new business by drawing attention to its advertising products is a crucial tactic as it looks to reclaim some lost ad spend.
Here are my top four tips to help app marketers navigate the challenging environment.
Tapping into owned channels
We all know that a decent marketing plan involves a blend of earned, owned and paid channels. While it’s tempting to use paid media from the get-go, many marketers have such tight budgets that this just isn’t an option.
Frankly, if you haven’t any budget whatsoever, then your only choice is to capitalise on your imagination and creativity to win. If you’re faced with this challenge, it’s a smart move to make the most of your brand’s owned channels first, minimising marketing costs and driving growth and retention goals.
Retargeting existing users to drive revenue
Retaining existing users is crucial even in usual circumstances. With poor retention rates, intense competition and rising user acquisition costs, re-engaging with existing app users has become a key component of an app marketer’s toolbox. But throw a pandemic and challenging economic conditions into the equation, and customer loyalty takes on an even more vital function.
Brands can adjust their marketing strategy to avert focus from engaging new users and instead increase the potential to re-engage existing users to drive growth and retention goals.
Prioritising ad budgets
It’s best not to ‘go dark’ by freezing ad spend entirely; brands that do risk being forgotten as competitors take over. Instead, app marketers need to use existing data and tools to extract rich insights from their ad campaigns – allowing them to learn what works best, optimise future campaigns and ensure budgets are spent most efficiently.
Work that inbox
App marketers shouldn’t underestimate the power of email marketing. eMarketer found that 83% prefer email for communication, far and away from the top choice over text, SMS, messaging apps and social apps. We also know that the vast majority of emails are opened on mobile devices, making this an attractive channel for directing customers to your app store.
Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora
Marketing is an interesting science. It is responsible for facilitating the flow of deals, and at the same time, it sets the tone for how your company is perceived in the market. From my perspective – as the CMO of a B2B software company – there are two basic threads within marketing that you must consider.
Firstly, think about the long-term. Consider your company from the perspective of what you want it to stand for – what its culture and its brand should look like. Everything else you do will need to align with this, so it’s a crucial first step to ensure your company has a consistent look and feel. In today’s world, individual consumers and companies alike demand a high level of customer experience. Customers have an extreme amount of power, with the easy ability to choose different options within minutes – your brand is the cornerstone of your success.
Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that marketing tools are the most important first step on their journey to success. These are important, yes – but not at first. To build strong foundations for your company you need to know where you want to be, and how you want to reach your audience. Specific lead-gen tools can become very useful in time, but their appropriateness depends on who it is you’re talking to.
This brings us to the second thread: your day-to-day marketing activities. To secure deals with new prospects, you need to map your audience from the moment they become aware of your company. Nowadays, 70% of people talking to your sales team about what you offer will have already researched what you do extensively, along with the benefits of your service or product compared to your closest competitors. This is what makes marketing so vital; almost everything your prospects know about your company will come from the content you produce – content is the fuel that makes the value stream flow.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t improve if you don’t know where you are right now. The data that you gather on your audience as they interact with you gives you visibility into what’s working and what isn’t. You can record the actions of every person who visits your website, for example, tracking where they click and what pages they move between. This gives you incredible insight into what attracts their attention, as well as an idea of what elements of the site could be more user-friendly or appealing.
As a final note, never forget that your people are the key aspect of your marketing strategy. Marketing employs a huge scale of talent, with analytical, data-driven people at one end and artistic, creative people at the other. To succeed, your marketing team should have a mix of both. Often the analytical side can be forgotten or even actively ignored in marketing, but it shouldn’t be. Only by considering your company from all viewpoints, can you truly build a marketing strategy that will make a lasting impact.
Kim Furman, Marketing Manager, Synthesis
Lockdown has diminished the how of marketing. If you want to connect with your customer, in-person experiences and events are beautiful memories but far off realities. This leaves us fighting over reduced space to gain our customers’ attention.
But we need to do more than that if we want to serve and connect with them.
- Remember the why and what
We often get lost in the how we connect with customers – LinkedIn for the B2B market or remarketing of a basket in the B2C market. These methods can all be effective. If I stop thinking about those shoes I added to my wish list, they will follow me around with puppy dog eyes until I give in and give them a home.
Yet, we can lose sight of why we connect with them – to provide value. Then the next question is what is valuable and meaningful to them – suddenly you are serving an individual and not a market and the how becomes more obvious.
- The customer is the source of truth
Digital means access to data. This data can help us understand what message, through which channel and at what time, suits our customers. But we need to take this further. When we understand our customers, we can speak their language, offer a relevant offering and become a brand they resonate with. To resonate is to vibrate at the same frequency. We need to ask ourselves as marketers, are we vibrating at the same frequency as our customers? Do we know (where relevant) what keeps them up at night, what challenges they are trying to overcome, what would make their day? This is not a one-off question but a constant undertaking. The answer is in front of us. Reach out to customers and the data. Then we can provide them with that article, advice or offering that speaks to their current state of motion and emotion – their frequency.
- Fight for share of memory
Attention is a prerequisite to memory. We have placed the right message in the right place, but we are not done. What we are really fighting for is share of memory. We all see thousands of messages a day, but they do not stick with us. Yet the chance of converting attention to memory increases when something is meaningful to us. This does not mean that every marketing piece needs to be Oscar-Wilde witty. Sometimes simple is best – clearly and simply stating how your offering solves a customer’s pain point. Yet, sometimes, the best way to stick is through stories. We are storytelling beings. We dream in stories. Placing a person on your social media telling the story of how your offering helped them is powerful. Social distancing has exacerbated our longing to connect. It is the ideal time to tell your brand’s story and connect to the why you are in your customers’ worlds.
In marketing, whether B2B or B2C, we are always speaking to people. Our job is to ensure our brands and offerings have purpose, resonate with these people and come into their worlds memorably so when they need what we provide, they remember where and how to find us.