Back for another year, the 2016 Canadian Internet Marketing Conference (CIMC) will feature a powerhouse line-up of more than 30 of the world’s top minds and movers of the digital marketing industry. FreshGigs.ca got the awesome opportunity to have a pre-conference brain-picking sesh with each of the keynote speakers and panelists. Today’s Q & A is with Drew Cashmore, Head of Walmart Media Group at Walmart Canada.
What marketing innovations have your favourite retailers used that you find useful or impressive?
One of the most powerful marketing innovations I have seen recently in retail is from our own company in the U.S. Our @WalmartLabs team in San Bruno is developing tools that allow us to optimize our digital marketing initiatives for both online and in-store conversion across all connected touch points. We then in-turn are offering these solutions back to our suppliers to drive overall efficiency in the marketing ecosystem.
In the world of retail marketing, how can you best use digital marketing to increase the public’s engagement?
The most successful retailers are using digital to tell linear stories across multiple touch points. Think about a soon-to-be-parent and the steps they would take learn about pregnancy, setting up a baby’s room or buying diapers for the first time.
Along the way they’ll use multiple websites, support groups and stores to make a decision and brands know that forming an emotional bond throughout these stages can support a lasting connection.
Marketers today take behavioral social cues to determine the right time to deliver the right message (i.e. someone visits a “buying my first baby crib” article on Today’s Parent). But a more sophisticated and accurate approach is to create predictive models against particular behaviours (i.e. customers typically buy baby cribs one month before the baby is born so we can build a marketing journey to support the steps leading up to that moment).
Digital allows us to tell a story that is relevant to the individual customer.
What do you think the future holds for the world of retail marketing?
Retailers can and should be the most sophisticated marketers because of our access to real shopper data. And with increasingly better data management platforms that can take more holistic views of the customer, retailers will be able to tell increasingly more relevant, linear stories.
Where Walmart believes that they can play a major role is in leveraging that shopper data to drive efficiencies in the ecosystem for ourselves and for our vendor partners. There is an old saying that 50per cent of your marketing spend works, you just don’t know which 50 per cent. The same is true for digital where studies show upwards of a 45 per cent waste in the way in which we buy ads online today.
When brands can partner with retailers to manage their marketing efforts end-to-end, it allows them the added benefit of being able to tie their marketing activities directly to sales!
How has traditional marketing shaped digital marketing’s approach to retail content?
We took the concept of the visual merchandising tool that is the ‘flyer’ and simply maximized the distribution touch points across the Internet. So now the weekly item at a price story appears on Facebook, in display ads across the Internet, in email, on mobile apps and across our website.
With increasingly better data management platforms that can take more holistic views of the customer, retailers will be able to tell increasingly more relevant, linear stories.
From there we layer on traditional engagement patterns with our physical flyer to target regions where customers have a higher propensity to engage with us online vs. in print. We also leverage a well-established traditional marketing planning approach to ensure that the items we promote across all mediums are available for the customer.
What’s one of the most valuable lessons that customers have taught you?
The customer has taught me a lot about the ‘observers effect’, which refers to the changes that the act of observation will make on the thing being observed. The further we move into the digital space and the more we can observe real customer behaviours at scale, the less we can trust ‘insights’ driven methodologies (i.e. a survey of 2,000 customers drives national marketing strategies).
And that’s what is so exciting about the retail world today; that this space is about to go through a fundamental shift driven by real information about real shoppers that can only serve to make shopping better for the consumer in the future.
Drew leads Walmart Canada’s digital marketing initiatives with a broad portfolio including omni-channel integration with stores (digital signage, targeted mobile advertising and eCommerce branding), customer acquisition through search, display, affiliates and email, and digital advertising strategy.
Over the past five years at Walmart he has led the development of a new advertising platform (Partnership Marketing), in-sourced all digital marketing planning and buying functions, and played an instrumental role in the launch of eCommerce in Canada.
In 2013, Marketing Magazine recognized Drew as one of Canada’s Top 30 Under 30.
The CIMC runs April 14-15, 2016 at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park in Squamish BC, Canada. For more conference and ticket info, click here.