Erich Wasserman, MediaMath, chief revenue officer, discusses how marketers can navigate APAC consumers' (increasingly mobile) paths to purchase.

Ahead of next month's ATS Singapore

The traditional, linear path to purchase is being supplanted by the meandering paths of the modern consumer and this has created tremendous opportunity for marketers.

Where the path previously leaned towards clean portraits of awareness, engagement, consideration, and eventual purchase. But today the increased use of digital devices has created a multitude of opportunities for consumer interactions with a brand – in infinite combinations – resulting in a more elaborate customer journey.

As a result, marketers need to keep pace with their audiences and operate a cohesive multi-channel strategy.

So what does this new route to purchase mean for marketers and what opportunities does it present?

Consumers in APAC operate in a multi-channel environment and move seamlessly between online devices and traditional bricks-and-mortar outlets.

The region’s screen of choice is currently mobile, which – due to sluggish broadband speeds – enjoys far higher penetration compared to the rest of the world.

According to Millward Brown, consumers in APAC spend an average of 7 hours per day using a screen compared with the global average, the majority of which is mobile.

In this highly complex environment, enabling the delivery of sophisticated, optimised, and individual brand strategies at each consumer touchpoint is a feat beyond human ability. So how do brands ensure they benefit from this scale of opportunity and the diversity of interactions created by a multi-channel environment?

Investment in programmatic marketing is increasing at an unprecedented rate, with many businesses spending a significant proportion of their marketing budget on this approach.

Programmatic activities can be managed most effectively using a marketing operating system, which accesses multi-channel inventory to make thousands of decisions at scale every second and turns raw data into real results for brands.

The benefits include real-time data feeds and a streamlined workflow from one centralised access point, so that marketers can allocate spend across the breadth of channels including mobile, video, social, display, and emerging channels as they are digitally enabled and scaled. This powerful and integrated approach allows for continual optimisation of the customer journey to deliver truly effective multi-channel marketing.

Marketers can ensure they are maximising the potential of their online activities by integrating programmatic buying with sophisticated attribution solutions that enable measurement and optimisation at a granular level, helping to create a broader view of consumer activity. An informed view of a brand’s attribution model allows marketers to optimise across the whole customer journey – rather than just at particular touchpoints – and apply targeted brand strategies that combine online and offline consumer activities. This approach provides marketers with a unified view of their marketing tactics to ensure that awareness, engagement, and direct response are optimised holistically and in real-time.

Marketers looking to offer a seamless brand presence also rely on the ability to track consumers across devices and channels, a process that was traditionally undertaken using cookies. However, a broad range of alternative approaches that enable effective cross-channel targeting – including mobile-to-mobile, PC-to-PC and PC-to-mobile – are replacing this technology. These bridging technologies can map across devices and channels to enable the targeting of specific audiences, and open up the full benefits of cross-device media buying and attribution.

This is a truly exciting time for marketers in APAC as the advertising industry embraces technology that provides tailored consumer interactions – delivered in real-time and cross-channel – and measured using sophisticated attribution tools. Those that stay ahead of the curve and manage their multi-channel marketing will benefit from the complex path to purchase, and enjoy the increased engagement that only fully optimised marketing can deliver.