How Elementor marketers responded to the changes that came their way throughout 2021

Featuring the insights of Amit Bachbut, Senior User Acquisition Team Leader and Growth Marketing at Elementor

Elementor revamped numerous strategies, from data, to growth, to creative

Amit is a digital marketing professional who is focused on the development and execution of strategic online marketing plans and implementing successful growth campaigns. He is known to deliver innovative online marketing strategies that reposition businesses as leaders in competitive marketplaces. Amit effectively utilizes competitive analyses, market research and statistical surveys to assess business plans and provide solutions that foster growth. 

It goes without saying that 2021 was a challenging year for marketers and growth professionals due to the volatility of market conditions, marketing technologies, and consumer behavior. This is why growth teams worldwide deserve a gold star for pulling through it all. 

With that in mind, I decided to reach out to some top marketers, to get a better grasp on how they responded to the changes that came their way through the course of 2021, and the much-respected Amit Bachbut of Elementor immediately came to mind. He was also kind of to get back to us with a ton of actionable insights to share with the world!

Here’s Amit’s insights on how marketers can revamp their marketing strategies, based on his work at Elementor:

While the pandemic opened a window of opportunity for technology companies to surge and grow faster, it also changed our ability to predict the future and plan ahead. As a result, our predictions are less accurate by default when we base our activities and budgets on abnormal years.

Additionally, in an increasingly privacy-conscious world, we have challenges with marketing measurement. We refer to iOS 14 changes, the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the industry trend toward more user control over data and privacy.

Media touchpoints are increasingly challenging to connect with specific customers. Marketers should understand the implications of this with their marketing measurement approach and adjust their strategies accordingly.

This brings us to a few things that we, as marketers, need to take into consideration in order to be prepared for whatever might come our way:

Own Your Data

Don't rely on "magical" black boxes. Instead, make sure you gather all the available data and signals to make sure you keep that data in your database. We can no longer rely solely on Facebook, Google, and other platforms' data for their targeting abilities. We need to be able to target the right users by ourselves in order to make sure we can customize our ads to fit the target audience, and by doing so, we can do effective marketing without relying solely on 3rd party platforms.

That's what we do here at Elementor. Once a user starts the onboarding funnel, we ask them a few questions that will help us to better understand who they are. We can use that data to also deliver the right marketing messages and give the user a better and more personalized experience. We keep this data in our own database and recommend you do the same. 

Consolidate Your Campaigns

In the past, it was common to create granular campaigns (based on country, device, etc.). Now you need to consolidate them as much as possible to allow the platforms to get more signals and optimize your campaigns using their advanced automatic bidding strategies that will eventually replace your manual bidding strategies completely.

At Elementor, In the past, we managed campaigns by countries to better control the budget, bidding, and messages. Today, we have consolidated countries by tiers. Of course, each tier has its own parameters and strategy, but the consolidation helped us achieve better results in this new marketing age.

Fight Attribution Chaos

Some measurement and attribution logic might not work as expected due to the iOS and privacy changes. Finding the right attribution is not going to get easier as time goes by. You must find other ways to measure your campaigns and activities. The Marketing Mix Modeling (Known as MMM) might be more popular as time passes to measure the overall marketing effectiveness and help you to determine the actual value of each channel and to allocate budgets accordingly. Here is a great place to start learning from.

Keep Considering Covid-19’s Impact

Vaccine or no vaccine, the virus is still here whether we like it or not. This has affected and disrupted the known seasonality cycles. You, therefore, must be much more dynamic and able to change your strategies quickly; we know we do. 

Think About Non-traditional Marketing

Focus on non-traditional marketing channels for user acquisition. For example, podcasts, TV, and programmatic advertising, which used to be difficult to compete with a more advanced platform like Google and Facebook, are now worth experimenting with.

How do we do it? At Elementor, we are constantly reaching out to other websites where we think our target audience spends their time. A good tip would be to go to Similarweb.com, put your competitor’s URL into their tool, see where they bring their traffic from, what their main referrals are, and advertise on these websites (You can do that with the Similarweb free version too). You can also use these URLs for audience targeting ideas on Facebook & YouTube.

Use Creativity as Your Campaigns’ Secret Sauce

When targeting capabilities are declining, creativity becomes an increasingly important differentiator. Remember that the creative can also serve as a filter when you cannot target well enough. This is  our latest video, where we target web creators, the builders and creators who make new web realities every day. Quite distinctive - right ;) 

John F. Kennedy said: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

So make sure you are well prepared for 2022 – it's going to be awesome! 

Click here to find out how some other top marketers responded to the changes that came their way in 2021.