Nowadays everyone knows the importance of maximising your marketing budgets and social reach. In fact, in this fast-paced media landscape, it’s downright essential. But if you’re a marketer, who’s not quite as tech savvy as you make out, how do you ensure you’re hitting all the right targets? Well, there’s this platform called Smartly.io, you see.
Indeed, B&T was so intrigued that we sat down for a chat with Marta Bonzanini, Smartly.io’s head of ANZ in Sydney – and former six year veteran at Facebook (pictured below) – to find out how it can help marketers nail their social output. To save you from having to go to the trouble of tracking her down yourselves, here’s what she told us…
Smartly.io’s elevator pitch. Lay it on us.
Smartly.io is the fastest growing Facebook Marketing Partner in APAC, providing tools to help advertisers and agencies automate, optimise and scale their advertising budgets and creative on Facebook and Instagram (plus more channels soon).
Righto, but what makes Smartly.io’s offering stand out from the competition? Surely there’s others out there promising the same sort of thing.
What sets our platform apart is that we enable both the creative side and ad management side through a single interface, as doing one without the other, in our opinion, tends to create more problems than it helps solve.
But what really sets us apart from most other software as a service platforms today, is the high level and quality of service we offer to our customers. We have a 24/5 chat service always available to help people using our platform, with real people behind it.
This support aspect is so ingrained in our company culture, that each one of us does a weekly four hours shift to answer questions and provide tips to customers, across all timezones. This ensures that we all know our platform inside out and understand the challenges that our customers go through every day.
Smartly.io has only been established for a few months in Australia. How has the bedding in process gone so far?
A tough but fun ride! We didn’t start from zero, as we had an existing client base here when I started, that was previously managed from the Singapore-based team.
My main focus in the first few months has been to take over existing business and on spreading the news in market about Smartly.io having landed in Australia and being officially open for more business. This meant running around the country to meet with Facebook, advertisers and agencies and tell them about the great things Smartly.io can do for them.
We’ve also held the two first Smartly Connects in Sydney and Melbourne, our flagship event that we hold across the globe. You can check out more here.
What’s the major mistake companies/marketers make when using Facebook and Instagram?
Getting pigeon-holed with their advertising strategy and not stepping back to look at the bigger picture. Also, Engagement. Promoting content on Facebook and Instagram for generic page or post engagement doesn’t really drive business outcomes. Marketers need to be making the most out of their budgets to contribute to solving their real business challenges: drive sales, brand awareness, brand perception, and so on.
Smartly.io has worked with high profile companies like Uber and Deliveroo. Can you tell us a little about how you’ve helped them achieve their business goals?
When dealing with large global companies, features such as the integration of multiple accounts of different regions, the automation of ad creation in multiple languages are simply a must. The volume of products generally involved, or the complexity of campaigns means that Smartly.io proves it’s worth easily!
Our work with Deliveroo is a beautiful example of how to maximise the use of our platform. They implemented three features, in steps. The first was Predictive Budget Allocation to help them optimise campaign performance, the second was creative ad optimisation to help them more efficiently fight ad fatigue, and lastly, through automated ads introduced highly localised ads to show target audience only the most relevant restaurants for them. This resulted in a rise of 70 per cent in acquisition volume and a 25 per cent drop of CPA.
What’s been the most memorable campaign you’ve worked on during your time at Smartly.io?
Koala is one of our local partners that I really enjoy working with. The brand is really likeable, which comes with an equally loveable cheeky tone of voice. To launch their new sofa and bed base they have positioned them as an expansion of the cool things they were already doing for their original product – the mattress. Focusing on, ease of order and delivery (only four hours delivery time), simplicity of assembly and of course an overall great product design. Check out Koala’s awesome promo video on Facebook here.
Lastly, you offer clients working with Smartly.io for the first time a 14-day free trial. How has this helped win new business, and what sort of results do you see generally in this timeframe?
We do actually grant access to our platform before the 14-day free trial starts, so that advertisers can take all the time they need to get familiar and comfortable with it before they set up their trial campaigns. Then they can have full 14 days of data to look at to compare results and experience its ease of use and quality of support (in person with the team and via our chat service).
This is definitely one of the most loved things about working with us, as advertisers need and want to see what they’re in for and how things actually work, when engaging with a new platform.
For more information on Smartly.io, you can visit the website, send its team an email or follow it on LinkedIn.
