It’s no secret that not only has organic reach plummeted but also paid results are getting harder to come by. In fact Australia has the lowest CTR on the planet which means that better planning and execution is required.

The challenge of the lowest CTR

On December 5 The Econsultancy published their November APAC digital marketing stats report. In what was enough to make your hair stand on end it showed that Australia’s CTR of 0.16 was less than half the global average, less than 1/3 of Europe, and less than 1/2 of the US.

That means that Australian businesses need to spend twice to three times as much on average as US or European businesses just to get to first base with their online advertising.

The reasons for this are not broached in the report. It could be that Australian’s have become jaded by online advertising, or that they simply don’t feel the connection, or that they’ve become more skilled in ignoring content. Whatever the case Australian marketeers need to start getting wide to tools which can help them outperform the competition.

Just to make things even more challenging the same report found that Average Time on Site in Australia was about 1/2 of that for APAC excluding Australia. So even when the smaller proportion of people do click-through their span of interest is far shorter.

Targeting and personalisation are even more important

The low CTR figures for Australia emphasise the need for marketers to segment and target audiences more accurately than now. And they need to be able to do this on every channel and tailored to take advantage of every channel. And, unless they have an outstanding Influencer Program brands will have to be using paid channels to reach the audiences they desire.

In placing more importance on paid media brands are finding that tighter and more integrated collaboration with their agencies is required. This can lead to frustration when the agency keeps the performance and analytics data close to its chest, and when the agency makes requests for such data an additional service fee. This is often in an environment of multiple social media management platforms with multiple sign-ons and no consolidated reporting across all content, campaigns and channels.

Holistic view of customers, and partners and suppliers

What is required is a platform managed by the client which enrols the agency as just one specific user among many, and where the actions and performance of the agency are tagged and reported and audited within the overall platform analytics.

For example Sprinklr’s Audience solution builds a holistic view of customers by centralising first and third party data across web, social, email, ecommerce, and CRM. With clear audience segments, clients can generate, target, and publish relevant ads at the most appropriate time, across multiple channels.

Agencies and other partners serving clients need to do so as part of such an integrated platform, whereby their access rights, publishing rights, content performance, ad spend, and analytics are all directly controlled by the client. This is not going to happen if you are still using Hootsuite!

Sprinklr Audience allows brands to understand customer activity and demographics, while also dynamically adjusting advertising. Clients can then build active, at-risk, or prospect audience segments automatically from unified customer data to ensure the right message reaches the right consumers. Agencies then respond to the outcomes required by the client as managed through Sprinklr.

Getting best ROI from worst CTR

It’s through the implementation of an integrated social media management platform that the basis of getting the best from a tough CTR is built. While in theory this may be achievable from a suite of best of breed products exceptionally well integrated this is not what we see in practice. For example, in a Best of Breed environment even the simplest attempts at tagging and marketing attribution prove difficult and distracting.

It turns out that in general a very good set of modules within a single platform gives a superior basis for improving marketing performance than a best of breed solution collection. This is primarily because of the need for governance, consistent tagging and reporting, and analytics-driven rule-based decisions which can reallocate resources and priorities across all assets and channels.

In a nutshell, disconnected modules and inconsistent collaboration result in a disconnected customer experience. Managing the customer experience is a game of data. And winning this game means understanding everything about your customer across channels, and using that information to engage in a relevant and personal way – at scale.