Authored by Reprise headlined Campaign’s Performance Marketing 360 event on 24th May at the British Airways i360 in Brighton, and what an event it was!
The day included a packed schedule of talks, panels and discussions, bringing together senior leaders from brands, agencies and media owners. Delegates gained invaluable insights around the shifting meaning of performance marketing, how to best balance short-term ROI with long-term brand building, and what marketers need to do to stay ahead of the curve in a time of major industry change.
“I think we would all love to know what the future of performance marketing is. It was very interesting in how the focus needs to be on customer journeys and less on digital targeting of who we think the customer is,” said Lena Koskela, Marketing Manager at Mooncup.
To try and answer this, Reprise held three sessions on the agenda, including Why the customer journey should be central to your performance marketing strategy with Reprise’s Head of Social, Matt Scott, and Robert Vocke, Director of Performance Marketing at the LEGO Group. The pair shared the story of how the partnership helped to elevate the LEGO Group’s understanding of online customer behaviours and digital performance.
With so many platforms and campaigns potentially running simultaneously at any one time, managing campaigns now requires a more intelligent approach if brands are going to direct audience attention in the right way – towards the most appropriate “lane” and the most relevant content.
“Directing attention with performance media [can mean] our paid social teams optimising campaigns on the fly to improve click-through rates and conversion rates and ultimately, drive more sales,” Scott told the PM360 audience.
This process of ‘on the fly’ optimisation can become difficult where product feeds can be somewhat cluttered and complicated, so tidying up these feeds is beneficial not only for the advertiser, but also for the consumer.
“A lot of clients’ product feeds aren’t necessarily fit to go live with Google Shopping or dynamic ads in social,” Scott added. “With our feed management platform, we’ve got the tools to clean up the feeds, optimise the feeds, and get that content live quickly for our clients.”
After attending the talk, Amanda Hollwey, eCommerce Marketing Manager at Danetti, said “I thought it was really interesting to hear how a big company like LEGO coped through Covid and how they built a full customer journey, not just focusing on the last click – and how it’s really important to build the customer experience.”
Reprise’s Chief Strategy Officer, Danny Blackburn, was then joined by Joe Dix, Global Head of Digital at WWF for a fireside chat titled Performance shouldn’t sit in a silo – successfully incorporating performance into your long-term marketing strategy. Alongside Matt Barker, Features Editor at Campaign, the pair discussed how performance marketing isn’t just another set of tactics to be deployed as and when needed, but instead a mindset that needs to be successfully incorporated into a brand’s long-term marketing strategy.
“Performance marketing is not simply a tap that you can turn on and off whenever you need sales,” said Blackburn, who argued that many brands had become “addicted” to using performance when they needed a short-term boost to the sales numbers.
On the event as a whole, Dix said, “Days like today are so important for us to step back, take a look at the greater picture that we’ve got, and really try and think about how we can perform better – both organisationally but [also] in the individual marketing activities that we are running.”
Finally, Natalie Williams of Reprise Commerce took to the stage to share her insight during an exclusive roundtable lunch event on How to build a profitable eCommerce business whilst retaining brand quality and growing sales.
The roundtable session, which included representatives from Bacardi, Papa John’s, Mooncup, Toast Ale and Danetti, covered a range of topics including the role of Amazon marketplaces as part of a brand’s eCommerce mix, the importance of balancing performance metrics with brand quality and brand message, the impact that regulation has on many sectors (particularly food and drink), and mobilising existing customers to be advocates for your brand.
Kanchan Lad, Brand Manager at Papa John’s said, “I think it’s quite important for the performance marketing team to tell a story – to be storytellers – and work very closely with brand marketing. We all are marketers – brand and performance do not work separately, but hand in hand.”
