Today’s digital consumers are increasingly mobile, except when they’re not. So smart marketers don’t waste time trying to guess the next big platform, and they meet consumers wherever they are.
And if you aren’t learning all you can about performance marketing — trackable online product pitches that dramatically reduce the guessing game of traditional advertising — you don’t stand a chance.
Those were among central nuggets of advice from a Tuesday night panel on technology and the digital consumer that featured executives from Groupon, GrubHub, Keeper and Blitsy. The Digital Professional Institute hosted the event, at Chicago’s Tribeca Flashpoint Academy.
Panelists agreed that mobile technology is the current big wave of digital commerce, yet Groupon’s Brian Fields conducted an impromptu survey of the audience of about 100. Fields, the company’s head of business development, asked how many spent more time on a mobile device than on a desktop computer or tablet. Only a few raised their hands.
While about half of all Groupon transactions now are completed on mobile devices, he said, people still use traditional desktops, laptops and tablets at work.
“You have to be careful about jumping to the next big thing,” he said.
Scott Grossman, chief operating officer at Keeper, said he works to avoid wasting valuable engineering time chasing tech fads.
“You want to be careful and not get caught up in the hype cycle,” he said. “You have finite resources. The worst thing you can do is get your team working on a product that hasn’t yet been adopted by consumers.”
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Grossman cited wearable devices as an example of a technology that, while ramping up, is still emerging.
Panelists hailed performance marketing as a valuable tool now and in the future. Steve Sanger, GrubHub’s vice president of business development, said it’s at the heart of the success of GrubHub, a digital food-ordering company that boasts more than four million users.
“We tell them, if you make a dollar, we make a dime,” he said, referring to restaurant owners. “That resonates.”
Groupon emphasizes that performance marketing offers measurable results, since a business owner can see how many offers users cash in.
“There’s an old saying in marketing: ‘I’m wasting half my advertising budget. I just don’t know which half,'” Fields said. “The beauty of performance-based marketing is that you can get instant ROI (return on investment) on your spend.”
Yet Grossman said “there’s a dearth of performance marketing (knowledge) in Chicago,” he said. “I know because I’ve been looking for it.”
The next trend for marketing? Grossman said connectedness, which is already becoming ubiquitous.
“In five years, it’s going to be life,” he said. “Our lives will be digital.”
Grossman said he thinks society is growing more comfortable with the amount of data marketers collect.
“That curve has come around,” he said. “We’ll see that, when it comes to data and our devices, the question people will ask is: ‘Does it make my life easier?'”