Driving Digital Marketing Impact: A Talk With Simon Lomas

Simon Lomas is the Managing Partner and Head of Performance at Tidal Digital, a digital marketing performance agency established in Dubai.

D.D.: What are the three digital marketing trends you are paying attention to?

S.L.:

• The rise of video in performance marketing
• AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and PWA (Progressive Web Apps)
• Omni-channel CRM and automation

D.D.: What are the main goals for your digital marketing strategy this year?  How do you leverage  technology to support that and drive digital marketing impact? 

S.L.: The focus for this year is automation. By leveraging automation, and technology in general, we want to automate the predictable whilst becoming more proactive in our marketing activities. Machine learning, AI and automation is driving our thinking for 2019.

Attribution, as always, is a big topic and in 2019 we’ll be working to test different models and perhaps create our own before the end of the year.

D.D.: What does it mean to have a truly data-driven approach to marketing? How does that benefit your brand and customers?

S.L.: For me, to be truly data driven means being relevant. By making data-driven decisions, from UI/UX to blog content (and everything in-between), you’re reacting and evolving to the behaviours of your visitors and customers — and relevance is key in both acquisition of new customers and the retention of existing customers.

D.D.: What are the three KPIs marketers should pay more attention to?

S.L.:

• CPA / CPL
• Conversion rate
• CLV

D.D.:  What is one of the common mistakes marketers do?

S.L.: Optimising campaigns towards incorrect data is one of the biggest and most common problems in digital marketing today.

D.D.: If you could go back and talk to your younger self working in marketing, what would you tell him?

S.L.: Don’t underestimate the importance of tracking and measurement. Be 100% confident in your tracking setup before launching any campaign.