Welcome Jesper Kauth, Managing Partner, Lodestar Marketing sharing his insights on Data-Driven Marketing, Digital Marketing & AI as part of the MarTech Thoughts series.
How do you describe your job to a 5-year-old?
I help companies find partners that can help them promote their products and services, who then receive a commission in return.
What is the one marketing platform/app/solution you can’t live without? Why?
Affiliate Marketing SaaS platforms, like impact and Partnerize.
At your organisation, what tasks in marketing are good to automate and what tasks still need a human touch?
AI is entirely deployed both as a tool as well as an extension of existing capabilities. To give a few examples:
– AI Reporting tools are saving us an increasing amount of time by allowing us to get still more complex reports put together without spending hours on it. This saves us a lot of time, as we put together the right reports with enough data to guide our next campaigns and engagements
– At the same time, AI of course can be extremely helpful in generating content supporting both the marketing of ourselves and our partners. This not only applies to text but increasingly to images.
– AI is also helping us identify potential partners for the programs we run. This is another significant time saver as AI tools have proven more adept at identifying potential partners than any traditional tools, especially in more niche contexts.
Currently, what are you primarily looking for in your digital marketing efforts? Awareness, engagement, conversion, or retention? Why?
We are looking to help increase awareness of the affiliate marketing channel in APAC. Affiliate marketing globally accounts for close to 20% of eCommerce transactions. At the same time, as you only pay per sale, it is the only channel that offers brands a guaranteed ROI.
In addition, you do not pay partners until they have actually generated a sale which means you have the revenue in hand before you have to pay the partners.
It therefore makes the channel extremely attractive from a cost and marketing perspective and allows it to scale without facing any cashflow or planning issues. These factors all contribute to make the channel uniquely appealing.
However, there has been a tendency in the region to consider Facebook and Google to be the entirety of digital marketing (TikTok is joining that club now as well). We are looking to change that and provide brands with better, more ROI efficient sales as they scale their online endeavours. Historically, I have worked for companies that used an ROI heavy affiliate channel to finance their wider PPC campaigns. It is an opportunity that should not be overlooked.
How much of your marketing is data-driven?
Everything we do is data driven. How we approach any brand or campaigns is based on what data we have available and what we need to acquire. From there, it is an ongoing optimisation to ensure that brand and partners build the strongest possible campaign together. This means an ongoing monitoring and optimisation of all aspects of the sales funnel. As affiliate marketing campaigns are mostly sales / lead focused, it is in the best interest of both brand and partner to ensure that the whole funnel is optimised on both ends. We help to ensure this.
What challenges do you see in processing data coming from different sources? How to overcome?
One of the main challenges comes when you seek to combine “different sources of truth”. In the affiliate world, where we are mainly focused on sales, it is especially the differences in attribution logic that different sources automatically apply to their results. In many cases, this logic is not consistent across sources which invariably leads to issues.
This is becoming even more expressed with e.g. GA4 which many companies are adopting directly without understanding the underlying attribution logic which governs their results.
In all such cases, the key is an in-depth understanding of the mechanics that underlie the logic of any given source and its attribution, to be able to combine the sources and indeed develop a shared single source of truth.
What are the top 3 things in your checklist when choosing the right influencer to work with?
– Influencer overall brand compatibility (tone, background etc.)
– Influencer audience
– Influencer main topics covered
A big thank you to Jesper Kauth, Managing Partner, Lodestar Marketing sharing his insights on Data-Driven Marketing, Digital Marketing & AI. If you want to connect with Jesper, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn!
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Last updated: August 2024
