During a recent Digital Media Marketing lecture, my class heard from Paul Michel, a Senior Performance Marketing Manager from the Harry Rosen men’s clothing chain. Paul imparted the wisdom that “[the] role of the Digital Marketer needs to evolve beyond a single channel focus to a more integrated & holistic view”.
He explained that the digital marketer’s responsibilities are often confined to knowing the best placements for media and driving sales/conversions on one channel. In contrast, performance marketing aims to take the entire customer experience into account. From helping decide what products to feature in the campaign to mapping out the campaign on multiple channels to guiding the customer’s journey through the decision-making funnel to even ensuring that the products that appear in the company’s advertising are on display in the front window of the brock-and-mortar locations if and when the customer is persuaded to come and shop.
Throughout the ongoing pandemic, the value of a performance marketing mindset has only grown. How do you lure customers into your physical store when gathering restrictions and public health warnings make those in-person visits a much rarer thing? How do you make the online version of the consideration and buying process as easy or attractive as the in-person process?
Performance Marketers have a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they can point to to evaluate the success of their infrastructure and campaigns. Digital KPIs like Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) and Cost per New Client Acquired and overall KPIs such as gross or net sales will bear witness to the marketing team’s efforts at refining the marketing message, optimizing search engine optimization (SEO) and retargeting, and creating a full-service and user-friendly purchase process.
As someone who’s goal is a career in content creation, when I review what Mr Michel imparted about the “digital media journey” behind the scenes at Harry Rosen, my instinctual focus is on “developing digital-first creative”. But, as Paul said, this is done collaboratively and its done best once the marketer has followed through the proceeding steps of the journey to learn about the company’s customers, be aware of ongoing macro-trends, develop a KPI strategy so that we will know if what we are doing is producing the desired results, and testing our creative ideas before nailing down a final strategy. It’s also important that the journey does not end with crafting the creative but continues on to how it is deployed, how it is integrated into online and in-store selling and knowing what has worked and not worked to adjust the current campaign and influence future efforts.
This holistic view of the marketing process is a logical evolution of the industry. It encourages complete and consistent messaging from the company to the customer.
A case study, based on the lecture, helped us understand this holistic view. From defining who our marketing plan’s target customers would be, what they wanted and why, deciding what our goals would be and then crafting a message and deciding what media we would use to deliver it, we experience the start of our own media journey. The case study also started the thought process of how to improve the online sales process, how to bolster the in-store experience for brick-and-mortar locations and how we would measure the success of our efforts.
And while what we were presented with is a sizeable increase in the breadth and width of what a full-time career in marketing could entail, it was also an eye-opening look at just how much is involved in guiding a property through a successful marketing campaign.
(featured image via Harry Rosen website)