MarTech Interview with Ivy from Hilton
(1) How has your organisation / team dealt with the challenge of the marketing industry and wider digital world evolving at such a fast pace?
Hilton has a Centre of Excellence (COE) model, which brings together SMEs from various disciplines, e.g. digital paid media, social, performance marketing. While you have these centres of excellence going deep on their areas of expertise, being able to work very closely together on campaigns and marketing capabilities allows cross-collaboration, rapid ideation and decisions, as well as cross-training.
(2) Currently, what are you primarily looking for in your digital marketing efforts? Awareness or engagement? Why?
This really depends on the campaign and business objective. For brand campaigns, we look at upper and mid-funnel KPIs (e.g. awareness or consideration) and optimize our buys accordingly. For lower funnel, we look at conversions. For all these however, we are careful to also think broadly about what the optimal consumer journey looks like, the signals that tells us when and where they are in their process and which channels and creatives we need to deploy.
(3) What is your key takeaway piece of advice that you would give when speaking to others on how to evaluate and select a MarTech stack?
We look at partners who are willing to test and learn approaches with us. Often you get companies who promise a whole host of capabilities and often leave out the fine print, e.g. selling on capabilities on a mature media market like the US or Australia and assuming all will work elsewhere. Partners who can offer solutions or help us think through workarounds, even when imperfect, are really valuable because you feel like you have a set of different brains thinking through a solution.
(4) For you and your team, which is currently recognised as the larger challenge - MarTech integration or MarTech strategy?
This really depends on market. For broader APAC, strategy probably is the bigger challenge given the wide disparity of markets, types of consumers and ad market maturity. However, in places such as China, it’s probably both.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT: MarTech Thoughts
--- Ivy will be presenting at the MarTech Summit Singapore on Feb 20 & 21 ---