International Performance Specialist – Mai Molina

Throughout your professional experience you have worked in travel and in retail, what do they have in common and how do marketing strategies differ for these two sectors?

Both travel and retail and other sectors one of the most important points to enhance is the recurrence of users.

The level of competitors in both sectors is very intense and the struggle for the first positions in certain terms is essential. Another thing they have in common is the investment weight that the brand can have.

Many times, other companies rely on keyword bid strategies from competitors that work for them, so you have to save part of the annual budget for brand protection campaigns as it is also one of the factors that affect recurrence.

Regarding the biggest differences, in my case, the fashion retail companies that I have worked with have been almost all manufacturers. So, when it comes to obtaining ROI, we must count on other expenses associated with the business that may affect the profitability of the campaigns, such as storage and logistics expenses, among others. So I also consider the profitability of each product to know if it’s worth it to bid for it.

In addition, it is important to know which upselling products are what make the average basket value higher.

Specifically, in retail you have worked for brands with a more young adult and adult audience and now you do it in Stradivarius, which has a more youthful profile. How does the age of the target audience affect the planning of marketing strategies?

Purchasing power in older age ranges is obviously higher, but as I said before, it is a matter of trying to palliate it with strategies to boost the recurrence that can make other younger ranges compensate.

Affectation also comes when it comes to communicating with your target audience. The tone of the ads, the images, the channels they use…

Today and although this is constantly changing, young people are still more connected to a wider range of channels, so according to the sector, there are different alternatives to enrich the way to attract traffic and therefore more sales to the web and so not depend on a single channel. Which is always interesting and less risky.

On the other hand, you are in charge of monitoring and optimizing all the international websites of the brand. Are there many differences in how the brand works by country? Is this reflected on the websites? How?

Of course there is a big difference. It is important that each country has a responsible person in charge of monitoring and proposing actions based on the use of users on the web.

In some countries online shopping is more internalized, in others there is much physical store weight, in others there is a lot of returns with different logistical implications and in other sociological and political moments have an influence on devaluations of the currency that affect profitability.

All this is taken into account to design different strategies according to the needs of the country.

What essential requirements must the web of an international brand comply with in order to consider that it is optimized?

Apart from having the factors described in the previous question, take into account different attribution, multi-device and multi-channel models especially for strategies where the off world is still so important.

In this way all channels are fed back to have an optimized account based on a common goal of the company, not just the department or Google Ads channel, for example.

As International Performance Specialist, one of your tasks consists of planning, analyzing and executing pay-per-click strategies. What steps do we have to follow to implement an effective PPC strategy?

One of the things that we do not usually take into account is that brand influence and different communication strategies are essential to enhance the traffic that later converts by PPC is of the highest possible quality. If we do not work on creating a funnel in which the new user is strengthened towards the purchase the more you advance in it, we will only be working the luck that we may have in that the user likes our product and not in that of another competitor in that punctual moment.

But, if we teach how our brand can accompany you in this and the following needs you may have, we will not get a client, but a follower. And this type of users are those who by themselves will associate you when they want to buy again.

Therefore, we must bear in mind what role each channel plays within the customer journey over time.