For brands to develop effective marketing strategies, they must focus on the long term and continue to grow their brand. Brands must remain flexible; learn, test and move.
On the eve of 2023, major macroeconomic shifts will shape marketing and advertising decisions. Marketers in the Asia-Pacific region believe digital user fragmentation, performance measurement and customer entertainment will emerge.
In a recent roundtable hosted by The Drum and TikTok on how brands can thrive in 2023, industry experts discussed the trends, opportunities and challenges facing marketers. The discussion, moderated by Balendu Srivastava, Head of Measurement, Asia-Pacific at TikTok, also discussed how TikTok has become marketers' preferred channel to drive business results through unparalleled product discovery, branding effective and growth.
With recession and inflation looming, consumers are becoming increasingly critical in their decisions. Sapna Nyomani, Publicis Groupe's director of products and solutions for the Asia-Pacific region, suggests that the basket is shrinking and consumer choices are fundamentally changing. The way consumers look at the basket isn't necessarily the lowest price, it's value.
"Shoppertainment is at the forefront of how people discover brands and buy at the same time," Nyomani said. “There is no real funnel as such. TikTok has mastered the art of bringing it all together authentically – content, education, entertainment and shopping.
Unifying user journeys in a fragmented omnichannel world is the challenge Vitya Vijayan, Head of Social Media and Asia-Pacific Research at M&C Saatchi Performance, is working on. “Everyone has been on their digital platforms throughout the pandemic, and it's pretty much the same as you, but we're starting to see fragmentation in the digital user journey as consumers disconnect. Digital experience alone is not enough. So we need to start thinking about how we can engage consumers from an omnichannel perspective."
Brands balance short-term revenue with long-term growth
In today's economic environment, traders are forced to prove the value of their investments. They tend to prioritize sales over brand image and reallocate their marketing budgets from media spend to ad spend because consumers care about value and marketers need to earn or protect their share. .
“To analyze trends in 2023, we looked at the second quarter of 2020, which showed that 71% of brands reduced their media investments by more than 25%,” said Abhinav Maheshwari, vice president of marketing performance. at Nielsen. “While this may have been a short-term solution, the long-term effects of the darkness resulted in lost sales. As we enter 2023, we encourage brands to move away from short-term goals and to focus on building greater brand value and trust to create long-term impact.
Pablo Gómez, head of creative and media at Kantar, believes it is necessary to strike a balance between short and long-term strategies and the pursuit of brand equity expansion. He said: “One of the key findings we've come to is that consumers generally don't like advertising, they don't like being interrupted. But brands like TikTok can strike a balance because instead of interrupting consumers, you engage them.
For Rajiv Bal, vice president of online marketing at Tokopedia, promotions are a way to persuade consumers to make more purchases, but they do not increase consumption of that product.
"Consumers are buying two when they could buy one," he said. “You might see an increase in sales, but only in the short term. The moment brands signal to the consumer that they are promoting a product, the shopper is left with plenty of choice, which is bad for the brand in the long run. Instead, brands should focus on brand building rather than investing in pure performance marketing.
Measuring your marketing performance is key to building your brand
Measuring marketing effectiveness can be a complex task because there are many different data points and metrics to consider. Metrics experts believe it's important to measure the few metrics that are essential to your brand, rather than measuring every metric available.
The concept of measurement is that whatever you measure should lead to incremental growth in your business, says Samiha Alam, head of agency AppsFlyer. “There are simply too many measures, too much monitoring. And it is difficult to separate the "signal" from the "noise". So you end up spending a lot of resources on things that won't add extra momentum to your business."
Rather than ticking all the boxes from awareness to conversion in a short campaign, marketers need to set clear campaign objectives and KPIs. For example, measuring the number of app opens is an important conversion rate metric for Tokopedia.
At M&C Saatchi Performance, clients are encouraged to add a branding campaign to their performance campaign. "We've had success with organic lifts and brought in a new audience," says Vijayan.
Brands need to be flexible in how they define success and have a long-term plan for success, not seven days or a month, according to Alam. “Brands need to focus on awareness, and no matter where you are in the funnel, you have metrics to guide the brand. Brand and performance teams need to work together, not separately.”
According to a Nielsen report, a 1 point increase in brand metrics such as awareness and willingness to buy leads to a 1% increase in sales. And a 1% increase in awareness and attention can also reduce the cost of acquisition in the short term by 1%. “Advertisers are demanding to measure twice and plan once. They want to see which channels are important for brand building and which channels are important for increasing sales. Thus, the entire budget is invested in both brand building and sales channels,” adds Maheshwari.
Among the key metrics, panelists agreed that the creative dimension is vastly underutilized. Marketers need to focus on measuring creativity at the highest level, where brands can look at the impact of sponsorships, creators, influencers, and new channels like podcasts or branded content.
Edith Wu, regional affairs manager-SEA at TikTok, stresses the importance of measuring the value of views. "A user's journey on TikTok is largely dependent on video views. In order not to interfere with browsing, users cannot click on ads immediately after seeing a product they like and then decide to buy a holistic view of performance."
TikTok solutions help brands succeed at every stage of the funnel.
TikTok consistently delivers results for brands across multiple metrics, including return on ad spend, sales performance, upsells, and offline sales.
Today's consumers want to be part of the discovery process. "Before the TikTok era, when consumers were looking for a product or looking for answers, they were only looking for what they knew," adds Alam. "With TikTok, they get a sense of what other people know. As a result, the way consumers discover, interact with, and buy from a brand is going to change, and kudos to TikTok for revolutionizing the discovery process.
"Results showed that in Southeast Asia, TikTok achieved a 63% better return on advertising spend (ROAS) than other digital channels modeled in this exercise, and a 5.2x better sales performance. compared to offline channels," says Maheshwari.
“Results were similar in other regions, including the Middle East, Europe and the United States, which also saw similar growth.
"In Southeast Asia, we also found brands using various TikTok ad formats, e.g. B. Using hashtag videos in feeds, hashtag calls to videos in feeds, and branded content. They have were able to achieve a 12% higher ROAS compared to brands that focused on a single ad format.We also found that brands with campaigns that lasted longer than seven weeks had a 14% higher return on investment than brands whose the campaigns were shorter.”
Top takeaways for brands
Asia-Pacific industry experts recommend brands ditch short-term goals and focus on building greater brand value and trust to make an impact in the future. long term. Brands can use TikTok solutions to better engage consumers through the sales funnel and improve marketing effectiveness. When it comes to measurement, brands can't jump in and forget: “Brands need to measure at a granular level, regardless of short-term or long-term goals. It is important to learn, to prove yourself and to keep moving forward, and the brands should be as flexible as the dimensions”, concludes Srivastava.
In turbulent times, due to pressure on marketers to increase sales, there is a general shift in brand image towards less successful companies. However, marketers must also consider the importance of brand building. Those who succeed are more likely to succeed.
Watch the video above to see highlights from the measurement best practices discussion.