Mumbai: Across geographies, the performance marketing ecosystem is constantly growing and has become more complex over time. It has witnessed fast-tracked growth on the sidelines of both the rise of SaaS platforms and the popularity of affiliate networks. According to Emarketer, total digital ad spending is projected to reach $526.17 billion by 2024, up from $332.84 billion in 2020. The onset of the pandemic made businesses take notice of monetary resource allocation like never before. As a result, in the post-pandemic era, new age tracking platforms enable businesses to make data-driven decisions and scale their operations at the most competitive price points. All this has been made possible by offering the highest level of automation, which continues to empower companies and ventures of all sizes with the tools they need to stay competitive and scale their business.

Need for tracking platforms to put customers at the centre of all of their actions

The current market offerings provide limited data insights and require substantial manual work. There are still ample numbers of cases where account managers spend a large extent of their working time conducting repetitive tasks such as approving offers, notifying clients, or creating Excel tables to derive insights. Performance tracking platforms need to listen to customer feedback and, based on that, build their technology stack. Equally important is to remember that every client has different needs and requirements, and they need to be provided with tools so that marketers can successfully measure and optimise campaigns at an affordable price.

Understanding the four key ways of demonstrating customer centricity and its impact on business growth.

Never before has it been more important for performance tracking platforms to give customers the freedom to adapt technology to their needs while also reacting to post-pandemic changing environments. This includes modifying, filtering, and enhancing events in real-time.

Businesses should be given a broad range of tools instead of a one-size-fits-all solution. At the same time, providing clients with full control over their traffic to prevent fraud is indeed the need of the hour.

Clients should have all their marketing needs in one platform. Automation is key to streamlining processes and giving clients more time to focus on high-value tasks that will grow their business.

In this regard, performance tracking networks should make critical analytics consistently available on a marketer’s dashboard, making it easier and faster to view performance and take action when necessary. By ensuring customer data reliability through the platform’s comprehensive data display, tracking networks can enable agency partners to have all their data accessible from a single dashboard. They should provide customers with real-time information and innovative automation to give customers time to focus on analytics, strategy, and scaling their business.

Tracking platforms should strive towards putting customer value at the centre of all of their actions. It is imperative to understand the needs of every customer in order to derive the potential value that they can expect from using the tracking platform.

Last but not the least, right from onboarding to daily operations, offering customer support services at the highest standard is just as important as the innovative tools and technology that help businesses to scale. These are two sides of the same coin: the innovative technology needed to help businesses scale, and a support service that helps them get the most out of a tracking platform. The onboarding process should be personalised for each client, ensuring that they get the most out of the platform’s innovative tools. Separate dedicated onboarding sessions play a crucial role in helping customers get familiar with their way around the tool from the very beginning. Once clients get familiar with the tool, focus should be put on understanding their use cases to help reiterate key features (such as the automation engine and optimization features) that set the chosen platform apart from other market players. Providing short explainer videos that directly showcase certain features—from how to set them up to refining them for a client’s specific purposes and more - is yet another useful route.

Time and again, it has been proven that a customer-centric approach empowers marketers to scale their companies, resulting in satisfied customers. If tracking platforms can continue to focus on innovating reliable technology while also putting in place excellent customer service, they can certainly help in accelerating their clients' business growth.

The author of this article is Yogeeta Chainani, co-founder & chief executive officer (CEO), Swaarm.