Tag: performance marketing

  • Mindshare names Sam Thomas as head – performance & product

    Mindshare names Sam Thomas as head – performance & product

    Mumbai: Mindshare India, the flagship agency from GroupM, has announced the appointment of Sam Thomas as the head of performance & product in India.

    Rehan Ali as partner – performance (North and East), Atishay Agrawal as senior director – performance (South), and Pratishtha Dehariya as partner – performance (West) are the other key appointments. They will be based out of Gurgaon, Mumbai, and Bangalore, respectively, and will report to Sam.

    Sam will be based out of Mumbai and will report to Mindshare South Asia digital head Gopa Menon. He will look after the performance business, productizing services and building enhanced capabilities for clients. With over 16 years of experience in digital marketing, Sam has a hands-on approach to setting practices, building teams, promoting innovation, and growing client businesses. Sam is an internal and external specialist as an expert in data-driven marketing and analytics. He will continue to have a strong focus on performance and measures effectiveness.

    Rehan will bring in more efficiencies for an existing set of clients and grow the performance marketing portfolio as well as support teams to bring on board new clients in the northern and eastern markets. Atishay will help grow the existing business efficiently and grow the performance portfolio for Mindshare in the South, while Pratishtha will lead the performance business for Mindshare West.

    A crucial aspect for the team will be to work with various departments within GroupM and help fill in gaps wherever necessary. They will also collaborate with teams to understand the existing business and provide performance-driven solutions for existing clients and create performance strategies for new businesses.

    Mindshare South Asia CEO Amin Lakhani said, “As we observe massive acceleration of digital adoption by consumers, it is imperative for us to deliver full funnel integrated products for our clients. Strengthening our performance capability further is a step in right direction. The expertise Sam and his team bring to Mindshare will allow us to continue supporting clients with their digital capabilities and performance excellence. I am certain that this team will play a pivotal role in the brand transformation journey for our clients and will drive Mindshare’s ‘Good Growth’ proposition for them.’’

    Mindshare South Asia digital head Gopa Menon said, “Performance marketing is becoming increasingly important to marketers and Sam and his team brings in-depth knowledge of how brands can revamp their digital and performance strategies. We look forward to continuing enriching digital experiences for our clients.”

    Sam Thomas said, “I’m excited to join an agency like Mindshare, which has been at the forefront of performance marketing to help companies reach their business targets. Performance marketing is the backbone of brands’ transformation as digital adoption takes over. I am looking forward to contributing to Mindshare’s ‘good growth’ journey by bridging the gap between seamless digital activation and implementation for its clients.”

  • Publicis Media Services bolsters leadership team with key appointments

    Publicis Media Services bolsters leadership team with key appointments

    Mumbai: Publicis Media Services, a part of Publicis Groupe India on Thursday announced key appointments in data sciences & performance marketing. Rajesh Viswanath has joined as senior vice president, data sciences while Vivek Tyagi has been brought in as the head of performance marketing. Both Rajesh Viswanath and Vivek Tyagi will report to Publicis Media Services India CEO Tanmay Mohanty.

    “The appointments are in line with it’s focus on scaled, future-facing solutions and data driven decision-making to deliver maximum impact for brands,” the company said in a statement.

    Viswanath comes with an experience of 19 years in the M&E and BFSI verticals and has worked with companies such as SG Analytics, Citiustech and Genpact. In his new role at Publicis Media Services, he will help enhance and embed analytics into integrated client solutions, underpinning data across all services and generating unparalleled business value. He will develop further the suite of tools, research, advanced analytics approaches and place data and analytics at the heart and centre of all marketing strategies for brands.

    Tyagi has over a decade of experience across marketing services, having spent almost seven years with Publicis Groupe agencies Zenith and Performics. His last stint was with Liv, lifestyle banking app by by Emirates NBD. 

    In his new role at Publicis Media Services, Tyagi will be responsible for strengthening the performance marketing proposition and offering, by harnessing the power of data and technology. He will also work with Publicis Consulting to help clients transition their performance marketing to a cookie-less yet increasingly digitally active future.

    Speaking on the new appointments, Tanmay Mohanty said, “In an ever-evolving market scenario, we are continually focused on strengthening our media product and offering in order to bring in incredible value and scale for our clients. The appointments highlight our commitment in delivering market-leading media services, in an increasingly opt-in digital world. Both performance and data sciences are key pillars for further transformation and growth of our business. The new hires fortify our leadership team, pushing further on our strategic agenda, bringing in innovative strategies, fresh thinking and approaches and exemplary data-driven marketing.” 

    “I am confident that Rajesh Viswanath and Vivek Tyagi, with their depth of expertise and experience will bolster our services exponentially and continue to drive media excellence,” he added.

  • GUEST COLUMN: How performance marketing helps brands maintain their digital presence

    GUEST COLUMN: How performance marketing helps brands maintain their digital presence

    Mumbai: Performance marketing today holds tremendous control over brand expansion and growth in terms of revenue and brand recognition. Before we dive into the benefits of performance marketing, let’s take a second to understand the term performance marketing better. Performance marketing is a marketing strategy that is centered around data-driven results. This means that the performance marketing agency is paid based on how users interact with the content presented by the brand. This is a measurable feature that makes the marketing technique ideal for companies or brands which are looking to reach their audience directly.

    Today, digital marketing is a field that has long surpassed all traditional methods of advertising. It is quite safe therefore to suggest that without a strong digital footprint, it is near impossible for brands to grow and expand without a strong digital plan in place. According to Statista, the world digital advertising spending, which was approximately $455.3 billion in 2021, will steadily increase to about $646 billion by 2024.

    As per McKinsey, investments in performance marketing tripled considering the figure from $900 million in 2018 to $2.6 billion in 2022. These figures are suitable for summarising the methods of digital marketing for the audience and the brands which are looking forward to growing.

    Directly affects ROI

    Through performance marketing, it is easy for brands around the world to connect and attain new clients and generate a loyal customer base. This is possible because agencies working on performance marketing already have their own established audiences, helping brands increase traffic for their site. Since the model of performance marketing allows for results to be measured in real-time, it directly impacts the ROI. Brands are able to increase their ROI as their content often generates more results under performance marketing.

    Brands can have a wide audience and grow exponentially abroad as well as locally by opting for performance marketing. As per the study conducted by YourStory, brands have seen their marketing profits increase by nearly 30 per cent without having to increase their marketing budget, making this marketing technique a win-win for the brands.

    Helps maintain a strong customer base

    Performance marketing is goal-oriented strategies that aim to increase conversions and sales. For instance, positioning your e-commerce business with a credible influencer allows the customer’s brand to leverage some of that credibility towards your brand or product.  mHere, the payments made are dependent on the content generated through performance marketing that is interactive and conversational with customers. This is how performance marketing helps brands reach their customer base better, through retailers and merchants, and builds a closer connection with the customer. This makes the customer consider the brand more whenever they are making any purchase of goods or services resembling the ones the brand produces.

    As per the research, when brands use performance marketing, they are able to increase their brand retention by 20 per cent. Along with this, they were able to generate their marketing-driven gross by 15 per cent. Performance marketing also has a direct impact on the advertising for the brand. The same search is seen via the optimising channels, resulting in a 14 per cent increase in advertising impact on the sales they make.

    Performance marketing is a need of the hour for businesses around the world and around the corner. Many brands are moving towards performance marketing looking for its promising returns as the revenue generated helps the brands. According to the study conducted by Spiralytics, out of the 2,300 marketers examined, around 62 per cent of the brand and enterprise’s marketing budget was directed towards performance marketing. This is mainly because of the promising results and the numerous benefits that performance marketing offers.

    The most advantageous marketing techniques have already taken off around the world. The figures mentioned above are only set to rise as the world moves forward toward a shift that is dominated by digital marketing. It is safe to say that without investing in performance marketing, brands cannot compete with their counterparts who have a strong digital presence.

    (About Author: Vatsal Rajgor is the co-founder and CEO of Digimaze)

  • GUEST COLUMN: Streamlining performance marketing via automation is must in post-pandemic era

    GUEST COLUMN: Streamlining performance marketing via automation is must in post-pandemic era

    Mumbai: The Covid-19 pandemic altered how we live and work in ways that will redefine our behavior even after its effects subside. As of today, businesses are still continuing to rapidly deploy digital and automation technologies which in turn are putting trends (previously progressing at a slower pace) on a fast-track mode. The marketing automation software market poised to grow at 8.55 per cent is slated to unlock a market capitalisation of $6.4 billion by 2024 (Source- Marketing Automation Market by Component-Software, Services). While over 51 per cent of businesses are already using marketing automation, over 58 per cent of companies have plans of adopting it (Source- Emailmonday).

    Across advanced economies, the dynamics of these changes, whether in business models, operations or consumer behavior will continue this year but not with the same intensity as witnessed in 2020 or 2021. Against such a scenario, a lot of businesses are stretched for margins. Therefore, the best utilisation of resources for them is to focus on growing their businesses by having their employees focus on tasks that are oriented towards value-creation. Using automation to replace all the man-hours put into repetitive manual processes will be their arsenal!

    This year marketers in India are channeling their energies towards generating distinct, value-added user experiences and making user engagement even more connected for consumers who are always online. Digital marketers in India should look to leverage automation in five important ways to make their performance marketing strategies more efficient and scalable.

    Offer testing

    Nobody wants to send traffic to an inactive offer or to spend money on users that are not going to yield any return. Offer testing can save both time and cost for advertisers and publishers. By identifying broken links, corrective measures can be taken in a timely manner to make the most of the efforts. This saves hours and hours of advertising operations along with manual back and forth communication to solve an issue, which can be identified by an automated tool within seconds. Some of the leading performance marketing management platforms offer testing as an inbuilt part, where all the actions from creating a new offer to promoting them to your partners can be validated by the system upon the user’s choice.

    Data-driven campaign optimisation

    The next key lever typically in the hands of marketers to pull when it comes to optimizing their digital marketing campaigns is audience targeting. They should focus on effectively targeting their audience based on geolocation, device, traffic type, carriers, interests, and other custom data. Performance marketing solutions with automated audience targeting can reduce the amount of manual work and cost based on rules set by the marketers. Additionally, they can set rules that determine which ads are distributed to the publisher partners to best match the audiences targeted using advanced machine learning algorithms. This means that companies can use granular targeting options manually and also use a platform’s recommendation tool, powered by machine learning, to suggest the right advert for the right user, thereby increasing the ROI for the advertiser and profitability for businesses.

    Automated insights

    While the first-generation campaign management tools only provide limited data insights and still require substantial manual work processes, the next-generation solutions are integrating more sophisticated data science tools. Digital marketers can partner with performance marketing management platforms which can lend them greater accessibility to performance metrics. This in turn will allow marketers and partners to see tracking and revenue numbers in real-time. Further, today’s data science tools can automatically discover patterns, trends, and business opportunities in the given data sets, so that marketers can further optimize their performance marketing efforts. Business users can query billions of real-time events in seconds with just drag and drop actions and marketers can identify patterns in traffic across a business with just a few clicks. Many global martech platforms are offering these directly with zero setup and no third-party fees and integration pains.

    Automatic offer approval

    Affiliate or partner marketing is unique from other digital advertising channels (like search or social media) in the way that the marketer must distribute and accept offers with the partner for referring potential customers. It’s a process that is until today manual and archaic in the digital marketing age. Fortunately, automation now enables importing, creating, and accepting offers from a vast number of integrated partners based on predefined rules, thereby saving tons of time and resources. When it comes to taking any action with automation, marketers should look at partnering with those martech platforms which allow them to configure the rule to their needs. Flexibility is a key ingredient for automation to succeed and their martech platforms should empower them to set up their processes with dos and don’ts and let the platform handle the rest while they can focus on other value-adding tasks.

    Automated client notifications

    Another big part of the partner marketing domain is keeping all partners informed of all the changes that might be happening on an offer. Communicating this information to the partner in real-time can be a bit of a challenge. With automation, all of this can be handled with a click of a button. An industry-wide innovation like ‘Smart Triggers’ helps identify your partners and the contacts, write an appropriate text for the update, and all marketers need to do is schedule it.

    Performance marketing is made even more effective by automation. To really hit business goals, it’s important to build campaigns strategically—choose the right platforms, advertising formats, and optimisation goals, focus on the right audience, and, of course, create campaigns that will resonate with the target audience. Automation is the key to scaling and achieving these goals.

    (About Author: Yogeeta Chainani co-founded Swaarm, in September 2020. As the CEO of Swaarm, Yogeeta drives product innovation and human resources along with spearheading business development in India and other global geographies for her company.)

  • upGrad India onboards Abdul Wajid Shaikh as head of performance marketing

    upGrad India onboards Abdul Wajid Shaikh as head of performance marketing

    Mumbai: Edtech major upGrad on Friday announced the appointment of Abdul Wajid Shaikh as head of performance marketing for India.

    In his new role, Shaikh will be driving end-to-end performance marketing across digital platforms. He will also work towards streamlining and automation of the entire performance marketing processes to facilitate profitability, said the company in a statement.

    Welcoming Shaikh on board, upGrad CEO-India, Arjun Mohan said, “We are thrilled to have yet another LifeLong learner, Abdul who joins the upGrad family. Aligned with our vision, he brings with him deep domain expertise, given his decade-long experience with other digital brands. I am confident that Abdul joining our dynamic performance marketing vertical will help us scale newer heights while staying true to our vision and core beliefs.”

    Shaikh comes with more than a decade of experience in the digital marketing industry. He has had stints with brands like WhiteHat Jr, Flipkart, Viu OTT, InMobi, Mobiclicks.

    Talking about his new role, Shaikh shared, “Being part of upGrad is going to be an exciting new phase for me. The edtech space is booming with potential and prospects waiting to be explored. And upGrad is at the cusp of new possibilities and opportunities. I resonate with upGrad as a brand and its philosophy of Lifelong Learning. While I am enthused to bring all my experience and expertise to bolster upGrad’s presence, I am also excited about picking up new skills along this journey.”