#MobExAwards 2021 spills: British American Tobacco plans to beef up consumer journey

British American Tobacco (BAT) came in as finalists for Best Use of KOLs and Best Use of Promotions at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Mob-Ex Awards 2021. Mobile marketing is definitely one of the top priorities for BAT and Erita Santosa (pictured), BAT's head of digital, said the mobile experience is becoming more important than ever.

This is because consumers are used to doing their research and browsing on mobile these days. Hence, to keep up with the times and meet consumers' needs, brands should also evolve and ensure they have a seamless mobile journey. In this interview, Santosa tells MARKETING-INTERACTIVE how brands can cut through the clutter when it comes to mobile marketing and how it has pivoted to meet changing client expectations.

This interview is done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners' and finalists’ interview series for the Mob-Ex Awards 2021. To find out more about the awards, click here. 

When it comes to mobile marketing, what are some of the shifts you are seeing?

Santosa: Indonesia is a mobile-first country. According to an industry report, the population of mobile users is bigger than the country's population, equivalent to 126% of the total population. The number also increased by four million in January 2021.

The next question to think about is what does this mean for brands? Mobile connectivity has been changing the way consumers engage with brands. It is very important for us to pay more attention to providing satisfying mobile experiences. If the mobile experience is not enjoyable, consumers tend to research and carry on with other brands or move to other purchase platforms for a better experience.

Thus, it is important for us to create consumer friendly mobile ads experience and navigate consumers to responsive website that are easy to access from their smartphones. Brand needs to understand key metrics from time spent by consumer on every page or journey of the brand platform, and how easy it is to navigate from one consumer. Consumers need to have full access with just a click away.

How have clients' expectations change this year? What did you do to pivot?

Santosa: We are measuring consumer life experience from discovery, consideration, purchase and post experience journey with our brand. To drive best results, we do monitor and carry out automated learning on a weekly basis. This allows us to do many experiments for growth to understand which content, which platform, what buying method, and what audience segmentation works best to drive conversion.

Driving traffic from mobile devices is one thing, but having an understanding of how to pivot the traffic and bring back consumer to purchase on our platform is required and this can be done via many experiments to target precise consumer. We expect to have automated machine learning to help on content optimisation mobile friendly and revert to the learning base on ads bidding and precise targeting for consumer across platforms with speed. We strongly believe targeting precise consumer bases and bring them back with a better experience can increase conversion rate by two times. From our past learnings, 92% traffic came from smartphone devices with 96% conversions happening on mobile device.

On the other hand, the value provided from mobile campaigns is data-driven and analytical; we could have an in-depth understanding of our customers’ life time behaviour beyond buyer personas. It will offer us with a better strategy to put into action within a specific budget. There should also be an understanding of the processes involved in funnel analysis and the importance of branding.

Mobile is one of the key priorities for brands these days. What is one advice you have for brands to cut through the clutter?

Santosa: Every brand activation plan shouldfollow and consider where their consumers are before starting on their campaign. The mobile experience is more important than ever. From the moment when consumers do their research until they make a purchase, consumers’ relationship with technology continue to evolve. They are finding faster and efficient ways to get things done within the same experience on their mobile screens. 

Hence, brands need to employ a communication framework from a mobile perspective. Some aspects they can consider include how to communicate their brand value proposition via one small mobile screen, and how they can ensure consumers won’t get distracted and stay longer consuming brand content comfortably from smartphone. Additionally, brands need to consider direct communication with their consumers at just the touch of a button. Brand messages also need to apply a three-second rule, and consider the distractions from consumer landscape.

The communication journey needs to be clear and direct to navigate consumers to what they want to browse and help meet their needs. Mobile-friendly websites should not be different from mobile applications but instead offer the same seamless experience. Businesses are making headway in ensuring their websites are mobile-friendly and developing functional apps, but brands need to understand that going mobile is just the beginning. Brands must also understand that customers' preferences, expectations, and intent change, including how they interact within brand’s different platforms.

What are your plans for the coming year?

Santosa: In the age of consumer-first experience, constantly optimising consumer journey is our main agenda, and from many learnings we have done in 2021, it will help us to drive better conversion.

Keep optimising our first-party data to satisfy our consumer experience at every of touch point that we have invested in so as to maximise the value we provide to our consumers. This goes beyond simply creating a mobile-friendly platform but also covering every aspect of consumer from awareness and consideration to buying experience.