How the profit-driven marketer can unlock growth with outperform marketing

This approach, known as ‘outperform marketing’ was the focus of a recent webinar hosted by Incubeta.

The webinar brought together a panel of marketing experts, including Jaco Lintvelt, MD of Incubeta SA, Kelly Driscoll, head of Demand Generation at Sanlam, Pippa Clark, CEO of FTSE-listed beauty multinational, Creighton's, as well as Jessica Jacobs, Incubeta’s global MD of Incubeta Northern Europe. Together, they explored the key principles and strategies that underpin outperform marketing and shared insights on how brands can leverage this approach to drive sustainable, profitable growth.

Outperform marketing seamlessly integrates marketing operations to unify a business and solve three key industry challenges:

Staying Relevant in the Age of AI

Marketers today struggle to cut through the noise and deliver truly relevant and engaging experiences. AI plays a crucial role in solving this, as it enables marketers to better understand their target audience, personalise their messaging, and optimise their campaigns in real-time.

"Consumers will reward relevance in the age of AI," said Michael Ossendrijver, Chief Solutions Officer at Incubeta. "By leveraging data and technology, including AI, brands can become more relevant and engaging to their customers, delivering the right message at the right time."

Achieving more with less

According to Ossendrijver, the current economic climate has put significant strain on marketing budgets, forcing teams to find ways to do more with fewer resources. Outperform marketing helps marketers drive greater efficiency and profitability, outsmarting the competition, and even a company’s own budget and marketing KPIs.

Driving greater profits

Marketing professionals are facing ever increasing pressure to transform marketing into a true growth engine for the business. Outperform marketing helps teams tightly align all efforts with financial outcomes and the company's bottom line, proving their value across the business. This requires a seamless integration of capabilities across data, media, creative, technology, analytics, and measurement, with AI playing a central role in stitching these elements together.

Sanlam puts outperform marketing through its paces

The webinar's case study on Sanlam provided a practical example of how Incubeta’s outperform marketing can be put into practice.

Kelly Driscoll told Jaco Lintvelt how the company balanced its brand-building efforts with performance-focused lead generation campaigns. She explained that by aligning their marketing objectives with the overall business goals and integrating data across various platforms, the company was able to increase its lead form conversion by 191% and increase performance max conversions by 343%. The efforts resulted in a 6% year-on-year growth for the Sanlam business.

A large part of the success was driven by automation and Driscoll was very open about her initial hesitancy.

“At the beginning you have to put a lot of trust into the AI. For a lot of the time you don't know exactly who you're reaching and what they're seeing, but you've just got to let go of your inner control freak and go with it,” she shared. "We compete with the big banks, many of whom have huge budgets, so it is sometimes hard to cut through the noise. Our team mantra is ‘if you're broke you can't be boring’.”

Lessons for brands

The webinar's panel discussion offered valuable insights for brands looking to shift their marketing departments from cost centre to profit engine.

Pippa Clark explained how AI has empowered beauty retailers to radically personalise how they target consumers, sharing how one retailer had used AI to expand from five or six customer types to 27 clear customer groups. However, she also echoed the warning of relying solely on data and losing the customer in the process.

“We’re at the beginning of the AI journey, but we are learning that there are so many more than the traditional segmentation groups. Digital is all about data, and obviously that's an absolute priority, but it is so easy in that digital space to forget that there are human beings behind that screen buying that product, and you need to talk to them,” she said.

Heading up teams servicing clients from across the globe and in multiple sectors, Jessica Jacobs shared her insights, advising marketing professionals to shift their mindset, leverage partnerships, embrace experimentation, and drive greater integration and alignment across the organisation in order to transform marketing into a strategic profit driver.

The panel’s advice could be summed up in six key points:

1. Ensure that your marketing KPIs and strategies are tightly linked to the company's broader strategic goals.

2. Invest in both long-term brand equity and short-term performance to drive sustainable growth.

3. Embrace AI and automation to drive efficiency and insights, but don't lose sight of the importance of creativity and authenticity.

4. Break down organisational silos and encourage teams to work together towards shared objectives.

5. Be proactive in communicating the tangible business impact of your marketing efforts, moving beyond vanity metrics.

6. Be willing to try new approaches, learn from mistakes, and adapt your strategies accordingly.
   

“The outperform marketing approach represents a fundamental shift in the way brands should view and approach their marketing efforts. By focusing on rapid results, adaptive automation, and generative growth, marketers can transform their function from a cost center to a strategic growth engine, driving sustainable, long-term success for their organisations,” explained Jaco Lintvelt.

Marketers can now access Incubeta’s white paper on how to overcome the challenges of turning a marketing department from a cost centre into a growth engine.