What are the biggest opportunities & challenges in the next 12-24 months?
Opportunity and challenge are opposites sides of the same coin. Digital customer acquisition is part of the advertising and marketing ecosystem. The future has arrived and the opportunity is the pie continuing to grow. We are seeing exponential growth in existing and new types of customer acquisition channels (e.g. video, influencer etc) which speaks to advertiser acceptance and adoption.
The challenge is that there are more people at the table wanting a slice of the pie. Increased competition generally drives up the cost of acquiring supply at a reasonable price, increases pricing pressures and makes it harder to attract time and attention of potential advertisers. We continue by driving customer acquisition through direct response marketing and helping our advertisers scale.
What keeps your clients up at night?
Growth is not a straight line from A to B to C. Scaling is a challenge in any business but, in an emerging space like digital customer acquisition, it can be unpredictable. Specifically, data driven insights is still an emerging discipline outside of the Fortune 500 companies. We provide best practices to our clients but the sheer amount of data in real-time is a challenge for even the most savvy of clients.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
From 10,000 feet, it would be easy for someone to say “take your CRM data, create copycat profiles in real time without breaching privacy laws, and use that data to automate a highly scalable digital customer acquisition strategy where you have constant data insights to optimize over and over again.” Try doing that when you have to do all the other things to scale a business. As the pie gets bigger, there’s been a multiplication of systems and advising clients how to tie all those systems so we can sit down together and work off of actionable data is a challenge.
What performance marketing trends do you anticipate in the next year?
History likes to repeat itself even if the labels we assign to trends are different. Influencer marketing is, at its core, affiliate marketing redux. Video marketing done at its very best is a targeted advertisement shown on a mobile device rather than your television.
We do continue to see the acceleration of data collection and analysis as a means to refine customer acquisition as the price point continues to fall. Finally, machine learning, in all its various forms, will take data collection and analysis to a new level.
–Albert Luk is VP, Operations and General Counsel at Jumbleberry
