Universal Marketing — The Seed of an Idea

I’ve been working in digital commerce since 1998 when I built my first website for my alma mater Trinity College, Dublin. With every organisation I’ve worked for since, the challenge has been pretty much the same — how best to leverage digital technologies to attract, convert and retain customers.

Over the past 20 years the landscape of digital marketing has evolved beyond recognition. Google was in the process of being founded in 1998 and Facebook would not be conceived for another 6 years. Try to imagine a digital world today without either or both of them. There are now so many technologies, best practices and systems available to help us to achieve our goals. We have become do dependant on these technologies that digital marketers are now spending around 25% of marketing budgets on the wide range of technologies that enable us accomplish our marketing ROI. That’s a staggering figure.

With the increasing proliferation of technology choice for marketers comes increasing complexity and challenge; which frankly is what makes the type of work I do most interesting. The number one challenge cited by digital marketers today is the difficulty in “integrating disparate marketing technology systems”. Interestingly, the number two challenge is “attributing revenue to marketing” which is probably caused in large part the by inability to integrate disparate marketing technology systems. In the old days we joked about not knowing which 50% of advertising was working. In the digital world we expect to be able to justify every cent of marketing spend; and 20 years on we’re still not there.

One of the most significant barriers to a unified view of marketing performance is the existence of the two massive walled gardens upon which we rely so heavily to engage consumers; namely Google and Facebook. Google, the world’s largest advertising ecosystem, combined with Facebook, the world’s largest social platform account for around 75% of advertising spend in western markets. Both play evermore critical roles at all stages of our brands’ purchase journeys. However, in spite of their combined significance for most marketers, we remain desperately unable to form a clear picture of how they work alongside each other to augment marketing contribution.

There are many ways that we attempt to solve the problem of understanding which parts of my marketing mix drive the best performance; most of them incredibly manual. At the most basic, we are typically appending tracking tags to the end of urls and using analytics tools and spreadsheets try to consolidate performance information from our distinct marketing channels. Alternatively, there is a myriad of third-party analytic services that provide one-stop-shop solutions to provide unified view of performance across different channels.

Google for its part launched its unified marketing suite in 2018 in an attempt to draw together all the strands of its ecosystem into a single platform — unifying campaign creation and attribution across search, video and display. When Facebook acquires new platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp, it moves quickly to integrate them into its own centralised marketing platforms. Yet, while both platforms are pretty awesome in themselves, the worlds of Google and Facebook remain light years apart and it’s clear that they have little incentive to bridge this gap.

Now, imagine a world where you can in a single place seamlessly create your marketing campaign and publish it across search, video, display and social channels. Imagine you can easily form a single unified view of the relative performance of the different elements of your campaign, to clearly identify which components are more relevant at the different stages of your customers’ purchase journey. Imagine you can then automatically and in real time adjust elements of your campaign based on this unified view of performance — dialling up or down budget based on the relative contribution to your objectives. This is the germ of an idea I call “universal marketing”.

A world with universal marketing is a world I’ve imagined and now first-hand have seen the seed of in a company I’ve recently joined as ceo called Bionic. Bionic launched its first intelligent application back in 2013 aimed at helping marketers to automate Facebook media management. In 2019, Bionic has released a new version of the app that enables marketers to unify marketing performance across the worlds of Google and Facebook.

Clients already using the Bionic universal marketing solution are reporting benefits such as a time saving of 10–15 hours per month in creating and publishing campaigns across channels. They are seeing a significant reduction in errors as a result of the elimination of manual creation and analysis of cross-channel campaign tracking. The app enables them to achieve a reliable single view of truth around campaign performance across all channels. And most importantly they seem to be able to double their ROAS (return on ad spend) from social channels by automatically adjusting Facebook spend based on its true performance relative to other channels.

It is exciting times at this little company. For digital marketers, always looking to find better ways to attract, convert and retain more customers, there seems to be an answer on the horizon. Imagine, you can now spend less time tweaking, analysing and adjusting your marketing campaigns and still deliver better results. Imagine, that you can remove the perennial frustration of not quite knowing which elements of your marketing campaign are deliver which results. Imagine you can achieve more with less. Stay tuned for more.

In case you’re interested in learning more, we’ve put together a free report entitled The 2019 Marketing Challenge — Achieving Unified Marketing Performance Across Search, Display, Video and Social here.

Source: Medium.com

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