Hiren Desai, Head of Digital Marketing for Standard Chartered Singapore, ASEAN and South Asia, comes from an almost exclusively digital-focused background. But what does “digital marketing” mean when it comes to B2C marketing? Well, as Hiren puts it, there’s no such thing as digital marketing, because marketing must be digital in today’s world.

Hiren started out his career as a digital marketer in agency when Facebook and Google were in its early days of adoption in 2006, and then later made his move to Standard Chartered in 2018.

“A lot of advertisers (back then) had a bit of resistance when it came to digital marketing and the effectiveness of it, because they were kind of used to the traditional marketing that had been working for them for years. So, it was very fascinating to learn and build a business case, then take it to your client and convince them to shift and migrate to digital. So, I was very lucky to be part of that journey when we went through that transition from traditional to digital.”

In his first and current client role, Hiren leads the bank’s digital marketing strategy vision for ASEAN and South Asia, while looking after Singapore as his main market to drive business growth and new customer acquisition. Like many other financial institutions, the pandemic had accelerated the whole digitalization of the business as well as marketing.

According to Hiren, banks and financial institutions have always had the leverage of access to rich customer data, and today, more customers are looking for ways to tap into better decision-making insights driven by this data. Banks, fintechs, and insurance companies are increasingly using data to improve their marketing efforts, but there are still pockets of the industry that need more education on data privacy and compliance.

Internal education is crucial to ensure that all teams understand the benefits and risks of data usage, and that everyone is aligned towards a common goal of driving growth at an organizational level. To achieve this, Hiren works extensively with internal partners such as the compliance teams, data and privacy teams, product teams and the wider marketing organization to build a stronger ecosystem to address the speed of digitalization within the bank.

Empowering the Digital Marketing Sphere

Hiren sees AI’s potential to further accelerate digitization and automation, particularly in empowering the MarTech stack. However, he brings us back to the fundamentals – that AI is just another tech that enables machine learning, albeit at a much faster rate, and with more intelligence.

“With so much focus on this piece, it has the potential to fast forward and shoot like a rocket. So it has been wonderful to have this. And then again, it’s nothing but machine learning, and it’s been there since 2010 when Google and Programmatic DSPs started algo based delivery as well as optimization.”

Hiren discusses the advantages of using AI for media and performance marketing, including the ability to analyze and optimize campaigns in real-time with hundreds of variables.

“If I get a planner, or anyone from an agency to do that, you will probably have a human downloading multiple reports. And the person needs to have data analysis capabilities at an advanced level, which is not very common. AI can manage hundreds of matrices or variables at any given time, and I think that is the biggest advantage when it comes to biddable media campaigns.” Hiren emphasized that AI has the potential to quickly understand and adjust to changes in data and behavior in real time, which is crucial for performance marketing.

Using a machine learning model to optimize media campaigns is one way that AI can be used. Hiren also pointed out that generative AI can help marketers become more efficient by reducing resources traditionally needed for creative production, and significantly cutting time to market.

Do Not Personalize – Weighing Needs Versus Wants

Hiren foresees that for brand marketers to succeed, they will need to have more than digital marketing exposure, but also be data-savvy as MarTech and AdTech stacks become even more sophisticated. “When you’re trying to establish and create a connected ecosystem, you need people with not just solid digital marketing understanding, but all the fundamentals of how the data works, and how the tech works on the back end.”

With a connected digital marketing ecosystem, marketers can then design better customer experiences, such as improved personalization. Hiren illustrated two elements that underpins the personalization journey – first is the data, and second is scale. Brands need to know what level of data they have to work with, whether it is sufficient to clearly define an audience or segmentation of customers. For scale, Hiren sees this as a determining factor as to whether personalization even makes sense.

“It goes back to the basics – do you even need personalization? You just don’t want to do it for fun, but you really want to do it because it’s required for your marketing program.”

A Hubspot survey found only 36% of surveyed marketers agreed that data is essential for reaching target audience and understanding customers. Without a good grasp of customer data, marketers may struggle to define appropriate use cases and journeys to attract, acquire and retain the right customers. Hiren also emphasized that personalization could come at a high cost and become unnecessarily complicated, so the business use case to deploy personalization has to make sense. Without the right scale to drive cost effectiveness and tangible business return-on-investments, personalization may easily become yet another vanity project with limited commercial impact.

Eyes on the Prize: How Digital Marketers Present Success

In his daily work, Hiren is laser focused on demonstrating return-on-investments and success through his digital marketing projects. With Standard Chartered, new customers can easily open an account online, and Hiren banks on digital capabilities to effectively track and measure the outcomes of his campaigns. While measuring offline conversions may take a bit of work to attribute outcomes to media campaigns, online conversions are golden performance indicators that can prove a campaign’s efficacy. “Now if it’s online to online, it’s pretty straightforward. Go to your business, ask them, how do they measure success, and ultimately what do they want to achieve?”

To Hiren, having a prospect engage with a campaign is not the end-all. “A lot of people I see are stuck in the pre-acquisition journey. They either talk about the exposure of the ad, or the landings on the website, or the thank you pages. You have to go beyond and ask, what do they do when they become our customers? Are they spending with us?”

A typical acquisition campaign employing run-of-mill digital advertising tactics will usually present core KPIs such as CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions), CPC (cost-per-click), and CPC (cost-per-conversion). These results do not necessarily translate into immediate revenue per acquisition, let alone qualify themselves as key indicators of healthy customer lifetime value.

To prove return-on-investment, Hiren looks beyond the initial advertising results, and works with his partners to complement these quantitative outcomes with qualitative findings of internal customer data to understand if his program is bringing in good quality customers.

By understanding a customer’s growth post acquisition, Hiren can connect the dots between digital marketing’s investments and demonstrate true value in driving business performance.

“The difference between (digital marketing being a) cost center and growth driver is how closely you are aligned with the business outcomes, and be able to prove it”