#SamosaTalks: Performance marketing is like direct sales, says Anubhav Sonthalia, Merkle Sokrati

In an exclusive interview with Social Samosa, Anubhav Sonthalia, CEO of Merkle Sokrati, also a Jury member of SAMMIE Best Social Media Brands 2019, shares his experience and views on performance marketing, and more

Anubhav Sonthalia is an experienced leader in performance marketing and has been in the media and advertising industry for over a decade. Social Samosa caught up with him on changing trends in performance marketing.

Sharing his thoughts on the topic, he explains that performance marketing is like direct sales. “In performance marketing, you aim to simplify the journey to end sales point and optimizing it for all pieces of the journey instead of just trying to gauge the interest of the consumers as in old marketing terms.”, he highlights.

The key to effective marketing in the domain is the simplification of the marketing journey says the expert in performance marketing.

Sonthalia elucidates further that continuous optimizing each step of the funnel is relevant. Following such steps by the advertiser wouldn’t confuse the consumer and that should be the aim of performance marketing as well.

Reminiscing on the phenomena, he says that 10 years back ‘performance marketing’ was an alien concept. However, there is a lot of awareness about the concept in large sectors like BFSI, e-commerce, consumer app, and even in Teleco even though a lot of improvement could be done in terms of doing better campaigns, he explains.

Also read: #SamosaTalks: Mediums like TikTok are not restricted to elitists says Rajesh Ghatge, Indigo Consulting

Speaking on relevant performance marketing trends on YouTube, he mentions that “YouTube for Action has been a phenomenal product as Google has been able to tie up the search data and the intent data and bring it to YouTube which was fundamentally a video display platform”.

Sonthalia also points out how to stay ahead in the game in case of Ad frauds by using tools to combat the gnawing issue and that performance marketing is relatively less impacted by frauds as one can measure accurately in the end conversion metrics and also weed out a lot of traffic upfront.

Apart from the insights on performance marketing, he highlights some of the general trends related to the concept in the industry where he focusses on Martech. He mentions that technology personalizes the marketing journey and makes it more effective for consumers.

“ Martech allows to capture data and build a personalized journey for consumers. In media, similar personalization techniques can be used by programmatic buying. From India perspective, there is vernacular, voice, and video which are going to rule in the coming years”.

As a jury member of SAMMIE BSMB, he shares his expectations from the participating entries.