In recent years, experts (at least in the MENA region) have tried to identify specific digital solutions for a particular product or service, starting with digital marketing, SEO and finally user experience. Fortunately, a common approach now is to develop a comprehensive strategy, which then translates into strategies.
The most important reason is to make the process more efficient and profitable.
It is estimated that spending on digital advertising in the UAE will reach $947.40 million by 2022, and $1.42 billion in Saudi Arabia. The average marketing budget for a B2B campaign is 8-14%, and the average marketing budget for a B2C campaign is 10-20%.
As an expert in your role, you are responsible for managing and using the budget effectively. Therefore, it is very important for your plan to avoid unexpected setbacks and to achieve a satisfactory return on your investment.
With over 11 years of experience in the region, we have been approached by several partners who are looking for help with marketing campaign strategies that seem effective on paper but don't really work effectively. As part of our research, we look at the situation from a consumer's perspective. In other words, let's start by focusing on the user experience.
Map your campaign across the entire customer journey
When developing a digital campaign, it's common for marketing teams to focus on acquisition. But when looking at the data, it proves that capture and transformation also have to be taken into account. They often ignore other issues such as evaluation, decision making, and retention. In order to fully understand how users perceive and interact with your digital campaign, you need to align your campaign with the customer journey to ensure that their expectations are met.
In our survey of users in the GCC, we found that 60% of organic users lose interest in websites that are difficult to navigate. These reasons can range from poor content to technical issues. It is important to keep users engaged throughout the deployment process to prevent users from leaving your platform forever due to frustration, self-doubt, or self-judgment.
For this reason, we often advise our partners to look at the bigger picture before launching a campaign. Then identify the methods best to support their strategic goals. We encourage them to spend a portion of their budget reviewing their platform with UX professionals and users to identify any gaps or barriers.
The user experience methodology allows the company to answer quantitative or qualitative questions, including the "why" and "how" of leaks and what weaknesses the phone has. Answering these questions can be more profitable than focusing on the best areas of the funnel and ignoring what happens next. Therefore, a company should consider investing a portion of its marketing budget to answer these questions.
This approach only works when user data is used.
The power of user data
While technology allows us to track and report user data in a variety of ways, we often fail to take into account the context in which that data is stored and used.
UX Monitoring, Remote Testing and A/B Testing assist in the proper planning process by analyzing the data collected from real users in the organization.
Using data analytics, we can separate what we know and what we think we know. We can identify problems, prioritize improvements, test solutions, and come to informed conclusions. As a result, business decisions are not influenced by assumptions, biases, and emotions.
Before creating a campaign plan, it is important to analyze patterns in your data tracking tools and decide how to use them most effectively. By understanding your users' actual behaviors, you can explore their emotional maps, ask the right questions, and ultimately create solutions to address frustration, uncertainty, and security issues by focusing on incentives and rewards.
In addition, A/B testing is essential to improve the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Companies can confidently implement future campaigns based on insights gained from testing. In most cases, A/B testing is helpful (and sometimes surprising), especially when a user's preferences differ from ours. With A/B testing, we increased clicks by 80%, sales by 117%, conversion leadership by 110%, and engagements by over 400%.
In conclusion, any digital campaign should be based on the needs, desires and mental models of the target audience. If art, science, innovation, and statistics are balanced, it can provide an opportunity to increase revenue and return on investment for a business.
