Testing Times in eCommerce: Balancing AI-Driven Performance and Brand Innovation – Insights from Industry Leaders
We sat down at our latest ecommerce roundtable hosted at Soho House with a group of marketing leaders for brands and some of our technology partners to discuss ‘Testing Times in ecommerce: Performance v. Innovation’ to understand what are some of the pain points brands are finding as they navigate through an ever-changing digital landscape in this new era of ‘digital transformation’. Throughout the course of the discussion one thing really came to the fore: it’s getting increasingly difficult to understand what is actually working within our digital marketing.
There’s a number of reasons for this, but the main ones we discussed were:
- AI driven marketing products are taking away our understanding of the customer:
Thanks to Meta’s Advantage+ Campaigns, brands are starting to see better performance than ever before from AI-enhanced campaigns delivering to the ideal user at the optimum point in their journey to create a conversion. And it’s not just Meta – Google are at it as well with Performance Max campaigns delivering AI-enhanced, optimised ads across the entire Google Ads network. But is the cost of all this that AI gets to know our customers better than ever, and we have never known less about them? Well, maybe. Being unable to see inside the black box of these campaign types and understand exactly what it is that’s making them work is frustrating, but it also highlights how important it is that we can rely on our own CRM and analytics data to understand who our audience is.
However, instead of holding these platforms which are delivering results responsible for a lack of information, we discussed the importance of being able to generate these learnings for ourselves. The importance of a reliable tech stack delivering event tracking and user insights to allow us to fully understand where our customers are interacting with our business, what touchpoints they’re experiencing, and what is ultimately leading them to convert is the key to overcoming the lack of on-platform insights. The added bonus? These audience segments and learning can then be ingested into paid media algorithms to further enhance performance and revenue.
- Time poor eCommerce leaders be it Founders, CMO’s etc. struggle to keep on top of the latest developments:
Even the most essential of tools such as Google Analytics have changed so significantly in the last couple of years that it feels like marketeers are starting again from understanding how to use these tools, keeping up to date with latest best practice, and recognising opportunities for optimisations. Changes to the everyday tool kit of the Digital Marketeer are coming so thick and fast through implementation of AI, developments by the likes of Google and Meta, and changes to privacy laws that it feels almost impossible for a CMO within an SME to keep on top of the latest developments. It’s unrealistic to expect any one person to keep up to date with all of the transformation happening in the digital marketing space right now.
What is important is taking the time to build networks with peers who are working in the same space to share knowledge. Just by attending networking events like this breakfast, CMO’s can spend a couple of hours being updated on where to focus their attention. Additionally, training has never been more important, and ensuring that each member of the marketing team has as much time as possible to undertake training is vital. Choosing the right team, agency, and peer group to interact with on a regular basis can allow for knowledge sharing in a way that can overcome the limitations of a lack of ‘spare time’. There was a real consensus from all who attended that making key skills and learning available in concise formats with low cost of entry is in rising demand, be it in training, consultancy or fractional and freelance roles.
- We understand the importance of, and want to test, brand awareness – but the cost can be high and campaigns can be harder to measure:
All the brands at the roundtable recognised the importance of brand awareness and were keen to grow this, one of the key points we discussed around this was the importance of storytelling to communicate the brand ethos, and doing this in a way that feels authentic to the brand. One of the things that can be the biggest barrier for brands looking to carry out brand awareness activity is the cost – or perceived cost – of running this activity, and the risk of it not delivering revenue.
So how can we make our brand story relevant and top of mind for our target audience in a way that feels genuine and authentic without significant cost? We re-frame our thinking about organic. Rather than being a zero-cost channel, what happens when we invest in SEO – for a relatively small investment in comparison to some of the more traditional brand awareness campaigns e.g., OOH, researching what our target audience are searching for, generating content which feels authentic and informative whilst introducing them to our brand, and optimising this to appear at the top of organic searches can be an alternative. What’s more, investing in channels which have long-tail impacts on our business can make the business more resilient to market changes than paid media.
One thing that became clear over the course of our discussion – we can’t give you more hours in your day, or help you understand the artificial intelligence powering your most impactful marketing campaigns, but taking a couple of hours over a coffee to learn from within a group of peers can be just the investment your marketing strategy needs.