MarTech Thoughts | Mindy Teo
How has your organisation / team dealt with the challenge of the marketing industry and wider digital world evolving at such a fast pace?
Marketing is now much more measurable, and there is a great shift towards online marketing. The speed at which the online marketing playing field evolves is a double-edged sword. While on one hand it keeps us on our toes as we need to keep in touch with new platforms and solutions, it also gives us more flexibility to test out new initiatives and new creatives, and adapt our marketing tactics on the go, especially since the results of online marketing are quantifiable and we can be quite targeted in our marketing efforts. We typically try out new platforms and solutions on a small-scale pilot before rolling out fully. For instance, 2 years ago, we started to expand our online marketing efforts to languages beyond English, such as Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, to target our key source markets. As the pilots that we ran proved successful, we have continued to run campaigns in these secondary languages, be it on SEM or programmatic advertising. From a brand perspective, we also leverage on technology to enhance our product offering. For instance at our lyf coliving properties, we have occupancy sensors in place for energy management, and a lyf by Ascott app to ease the check in process for guests and access their mobile key, and allow them to keep in touch with the latest weekly events and happenings at lyf.
Currently, what are you primarily looking for in your digital marketing efforts? Awareness or engagement? Why?
I’m currently focused on growing our coliving brand lyf, as I’ve pivoted away from my previous role overseeing brand & marketing for all our Ascott brands. lyf is a relatively new-to-market brand, and the coliving segment that we operate in is also relatively nascent in markets like Asia. As such, I would say that we split our digital marketing efforts and budget about 50-50 between awareness and tactical campaigns. As the target audience for lyf is millennial and millennial-minded, we are very active on social media, and we’ve designed our lyf coliving properties to be very instagrammable – check-out the hamster wheel at lyf Funan Singapore, our first operational property. Ultimately, regardless of the marketing efforts employed, the product has to speak for itself and appeal to the target audience, in order to have a captive audience that converts into bookings and loyalty. The combination of a unique product and our digital marketing efforts has helped us to drive a significantly higher rate of direct website and app bookings for lyf, as compared to other brands under the Ascott portfolio.
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?
Always dive deeper into the proposed solutions to understand the types of integration required, ask for stats and case studies. The devil is in the details. If the initial feasibility assessment checks out, be prepared to Fail Fast, Quick and Cheap. Don’t be afraid to pilot new solutions, but make sure that there are clear objectives and measurables being tracked. If the pilots work out, that helps you justify further investment in the product. If they don’t, move on and at least you learnt what doesn’t work for you. It is important to have a good enterprise data foundation in place as customer data insights are key to determining our marketing strategies.
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