How can marketers build performance strategies that deliver meaningful results, better business outcomes and lifetime value? For Matt Scott, head of paid social at Reprise Digital, it’s all about aiding “customer flow” – the process of guiding your audience from their initial discovery of your brand and exploring your products to conversion and, hopefully, becoming lasting customers.
“We work with innovative clients across their entire funnel to drive performance and deliver business outcomes,” he told the assembled delegates at the Campaign Performance Marketing 360 conference 2022. “One way we do this is using our flow methodology across experience, content and media.”
These three building blocks were at the heart of Reprise’s digital marketing campaign with The LEGO Group during the pandemic. For LEGO, the disruption and lockdowns of 2020 brought opportunities as well as challenges. “We knew people were looking for hobbies,” said Robert Vocke, director of performance marketing at The LEGO Group. “Families were looking for things to do at home with their kids, for online education, but also for things to do away from the screen. And we also saw adults looking for mindful activities.”
Like all businesses, LEGO faced logistical struggles in the pandemic, with third-party retailers, in particular, struggling to fulfil product orders. “Fortunately, we’ve been investing heavily in our own ecosystem of LEGO.com and branded e-commerce, so it was a good opportunity for us to come up with rapid new ways of working internally – and kickstart the things we already had planned for the next couple of years,” said Vocke.
For LEGO and Reprise, that meant swinging into action to launch a campaign which sought to engage new audiences, as well as loyal customers across 14 different markets. It utilised Reprise’s targeting and optimisation technology to make sure potential customers were seeing the right messages, in the right medium, at the right time. As a result, the campaign helped drive an impressive 68% increase in sales and 50% increase in click-through rates.
1. Experience: remove friction from your customer journey
What does a frictionless customer journey look like online? “It’s really just about being very clear what that browsing journey mission is for the shopper, and making it easy for them to get there in as few clicks as possible,” said Vocke.
That means being able to differentiate new customer prospects from somebody who has already made up their mind about a product, based on what they’re searching for or the kind of pages they are interacting with.
“If someone knows what they want to buy, we don’t necessarily need to put a lot of branding in front of them, we just need to get them right to the product,” said Vocke. He sees the key as separating your online marketing activities into “swim lanes”, to avoid cannibalising audiences across different campaigns.
2. Media: direct your customer’s attention
Today’s marketers need to use media more intelligently to direct audience attention in the right way, argued Scott. “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.”
Getting the customer journey right can also mean tidying up what potential customers are seeing online. “A lot of clients’ product feeds aren’t necessarily fit to go live with Google Shopping or dynamic ads in social,” noted Scott. “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.”
3. Content: must be relevant and dynamic
Your customer journey needs to offer the right kind of content – whether your audience is simply seeking to learn more about the brand, engage further or actually make a purchase.
This can mean making intelligent use of your brand’s existing content, said Vocke. “Using the product feed solution, we could elevate different types of creative that were not already hard-baked into our product feeds.”
“One of the key things we focused on was trying to find audiences that were not engaging already, and coming up with unique objectives for getting those audiences to begin that engagement and, hopefully, come back and convert,” Vocke continued. “We really relied on the machine-learning built into the platforms we were running with Reprise to run this at scale and speed.”
For both marketers, nailing the right tone of voice across all your content platforms is also paramount. “Tone of voice is one element of your creative that you probably want to test to improve performance across landing pages and platforms like Facebook and Instagram,” said Scott. “We would always recommend A-B testing; and we can also utilise proprietary tech or third-party tools to test thousands of ads, with different messaging and different images, at scale.”