Personalisation, others to drive marketing comms in 2017- experts

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) experts have projected that personalised marketing, performance and convergence through collection of consumer data will be key drivers of marketing communications in 2017 and beyond as brand owners seek to build on their equity and return of investment (ROI) despite the recession.

At a gathering of digital marketing agencies, brand owners, IT experts and media practitioners, tagged “An Evening of Innovation with Twinpine – Africa’s pioneer and premium mobile marketing company”, Oduntan Odubanjo, chief operating officer at Twinpine noted that globally, data will continue to transform mobile marketing, while the challenging economy will make more brand owners pay extra attention to performance and build on personalised communication to reach their target customers.

During his presentation titled: “Personalisation, Convergence and Performance: How Data is Transforming Mobile Marketing”, Odubanjo stated that the promise of data is to help brand personalised marketing messages, connect more with their customers and deliver seamless experiences.

“Data collection helps to understand the consumers’ demography, needs, and behavior thereby making it possible to personalise messages for them. This makes it possible to have better consumer experiences, improved satisfaction, and more loyalty.

“We are also seeing a convergence of media platforms as it has become more difficult to focus on one media channel, hence, the need for data has also become important” he said.

Commenting on the future of mobile marketing, Odubanjo, said “there will be more brands looking into their data offerings and strategy”. He projected that “local brands will begin to look more into collecting data about their customers and request for more targeting to ensure that their budgets are well spent.”According to Elo Umeh, founder of Twinpine, Twinpine has done a lot of work on data in the last 5 years of its existence.

“We have generated data and are constantly doing more to deliver value around data for our clients. This is fueled by our belief that more can be done as the data space gets intelligent and smarter with the increasing use of smartphones.

“The use of apps and internet connectivity between the devices helps to generate lots of data which is very helpful in the data gathering process,” he said.

Predicting the year 2017, Umeh said that some brands will frame their narrative around cost-cutting while some brands will become more aggressive in their marketing by spending more to improve their market share.

“We think that it’s in adversity that you can try to do very interesting things. For example, Twinpine was launched in 2009 – in the middle of a global recession. When there is a boom, there is limited opportunity because there are lots of people in the market but when there is adversity there are limited people in the market and they benefit from it in the long run.”

During the panel session at the event, which consisted of Odutan Odubanjo, Oti Ukubeyinje, Media Director at Sponge Digital, Jumoke Okikiolu, head product Marketing at Samsung West Africa, John Iseghohi, Digital Marketing & Strategy at Etisalat and Tunde Kara, Managing Director Sales, Nigeria, the panelists agreed that in the coming year, a lot will happen in personalised marketing and convergence.

Brands need to think of how to infuse marketing into content in a way that consumers feel like they are actually having a personal communication with brands.

At the event, Twinpine unveiled its new ad formats (Native Ads, 3D Ads, Brand Cast, Call-to-Action Ads), Twinpine’s Mobile Intelligence Portal, Programmatic Platform and Adrenaline