‘Moments Made By Marketing’ Powered by Salesforce: Marzdi Kalianiwala, Head - Marketing & Business Intelligence, BookMyShow, shares how they interact with audience based on their past consumption As part of a special series, ‘Moments Made By Marketing’ Powered by Salesforce, Marzdi Kalianiwala, Head - Marketing & Business Intelligence, BookMyShow tells us how the on-line ticketing platform interacts with specific audience groups based on their past consumption patterns to give them a personalised and specially curated experience. exchange4media Group has curated a series of interviews called ‘Moments Made By Marketing’ Powered by Salesforce where we focus on how brands are building connected experiences in a multi-platform environment to reach their consumers. In the third interview of this series, Marzdi Kalianiwala, Head - Marketing & Business Intelligence, BookMyShow, says that BookMyShow’s strength as a discovery engine and provider of alternate offerings in a virtual format across genres, has helped millions of entertainment lovers get access to differentiated entertainment which helped enhance engagement levels on the platform.He adds that to make their customers’ journey valuable, majority of the company’s re-engagement communication is hyper-personalised as it’s  incisive data analytical capabilities allow for customisation of offerings, promotions and content pieces based on a customer’s preferred entertainment options basis his/her past transaction and search behaviour. Kalianiwala also highlights that when the consumer acquisition processes are undertaken on the back of precise data points, it enables a significant cost reduction in the entire customer acquisition process, re-engagement and up-selling or cross-selling.

Edited Excerpts  What were the challenges you faced in engaging with your customers and creating a hyper-personalized experience across multi-channel platforms during the last few months? As the one-stop-shop for all things entertainment, BookMyShow has been the default discovery engine for millions of entertainment lovers across not just India, but also globally across the Middle East and South Asia. Our repertoire of entertainment experiences has always encompassed movies, plays, music shows, comedy and a whole range of such offerings, helping us garner some valuable consumer insights and their preferences amongst entertainment experiences as far as engagement goes. The scale and number of events hosted, produced and promoted by BookMyShow puts us at the centre of a robust data pool, further strengthening our understanding of varied consumers’ consumption trends. With the health crisis impacting out-of-home entertainment directly, there has been a shortage of entertainment experiences across the board. This is where our strength as a discovery engine and provider of alternate offerings in a virtual format across genres, has helped millions of entertainment lovers in India, as also globally, get access to differentiated entertainment. Creating opportunities for consumers through virtual live events such as Live From HQ, the My Singapore Connect initiative, Vodafone #RechargeForGood concert and more recently the digital edition of Rambo Circus has significantly helped enhance engagement levels on the platform. While we have not faced any major executional challenges thus far, contextual challenges like a single device hosting multiple users or users not having signed in while engaging with an offering thus limiting the experience that can be tailored for them, sometimes do come into play. To make our customers’ journey valuable & worth their time, majority of our re-engagement communication is hyper-personalised. Our incisive data analytical capabilities allow for customisation of offerings, promotions and content pieces based on a customer’s preferred entertainment options basis his/her past transaction and search behaviour. This is further heightened with the re-opening of cinemas and on-ground live events even if in a limited capacity. It allows us to interact with specific audience groups based on their past consumption patterns and give them a personalised and specially curated experience, communicating where and how they can have safer entertainment outings or experience an online event, whichever they may prefer. These offerings not only become an able assisting tool for consumers to discover new entertainment options during this period but also make a critical value-add for brands looking to partner and engage with suitable audience pools thus charting a commercially viable path as well. How do you target existing and new consumers with relevant communication about your offerings across platforms so that communication reaches the TG and ensures the mandated ROI? At BookMyShow, the knowledge of engagement, preferences and transaction behaviour of millions of consumers helps us devise and work towards a digital journey in place, with appropriate communication for both our existing and new users. With the help of our advertising technology (ad-tech) integrations and big data algorithms and capabilities, we are able to use this information prudently to provide a unique and customised platform experience to a consumer. This helps ensure a hyper-personalised and seamless communication outreach, as we reach relevant consumers for a host of offerings listed on the platform basis age, interest, behaviour on the platform, etc. Specially curated journeys for our existing consumers help us bring down the cost of engagements and push up retention. It ensures that we not only ably assist their transaction choices on the platform but also become their one-stop-shop for all things entertainment including discovering new movies, live events, online events or even content offerings such as trivia, popular trends and more about their favourite stars, movies, series and other entertainment experiences. How do you leverage data-driven analytics while strategizing your media campaigns? At BookMyShow, we recognise the need to continually evolve ourselves using our data intelligence and user insights to be able to match our audiences’ ever-expanding preferences as also attract audiences to a particular campaign across any medium of their choice. All our media campaigns are strongly data-driven, as we use relevant analytics to target sizeable cohorts across genres, age groups, medium of audience accessibility. We then personalise communication across various media formats and this has been successful in providing a significant conversion.   As an industry, you have first-hand access to consumers and their data. How do you extract value from first-party data? The first-hand access to consumer and their data adds an additional responsibility on BookMyShow to ensure that this data is protected and used in a manner that we can curate great entertainment experiences for consumers without being too intrusive. At BookMyShow, we use our consumer data to create relevant target groups to evaluate potential business and incisive communication opportunities, thus working to create a better entertainment experience for millions of users who reach out to us for all their entertainment needs. Access to first-hand consumer data means the responsibility on the security, protection and prudent use of the data lies on BookMyShow. We consistently strive to use incisive consumer data in a manner that can help curate great entertainment experiences for consumers without being intrusive. Moreover, strong consumer understanding also helps liaison with brands that are looking to engage with specific audience groups to remain salient in these times. We have been able to curate specialised consumer initiatives while working with brands like the Singapore Tourism Board for ‘My Singapore Connect’, Vodafone for the #RechargeForGood concert, Nivea for the ‘One Nation Run’, GoPro for the ‘Capture To Share’ workshop as also Rupay for the multi-phased #StayFitIndiaChallenge amongst others, through the analysis of first-party data to deliver successful results for both the brands as also consumers opting for these offerings. Based on what we have done so far, we have been receiving growing interest from content creators, promoter partners and brands for curating specialised experiences and offerings for relevant audiences for them, and we are thrilled to be able to build a cohesive user community for our partners and thus widen the ambit of entertainment to more audiences through these. How do you leverage automation and technology to optimize your campaign and increase efficiency? What uptick has been seen in adding new consumers and up-selling new products to existing customers? We work closely with our partners who support us in automating the digital communication journeys, while targeting relevant consumers. We have thoughtfully curated automated nudges at various levels of a consumer's journey with us, bringing him/her back to the offering and facilitating a transaction, if left incomplete midway. When consumer acquisition processes are undertaken on the back of precise data points, as done at BookMyShow, it enables a significant cost reduction in the entire customer acquisition process, re-engagement and up-selling or cross-selling - all executed in a cost-effective manner. We also use ad-tech platforms to bring in creative automation to reduce dependency on multiple creative creations to cater to multiple platforms. For instance, consumers who are fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and have chosen BookMyShow for all their MCU movie outings would be relevant audiences for whom content snippets, trivia and new information on the Marvel film franchise on our content platform BookMyShow Buzz, may be of interest. This helps us send them specific, exclusive communication regarding their interest areas to make the experience richer for users. With content being a big piece of marketing, how do target existing and new consumers with data-driven content? What are the key challenges? BookMyShow’s core focus has been on content-driven entertainment experiences for all users across demographics. A consumer’s behaviour and engagement history on the platform combined with our big data algorithms help create specialised, curated content journeys for existing as well as new consumers on the platform. For our consumer outreach, we work towards creating consumer cohorts that share similar content consumption patterns, thus enabling us to have a targeted outreach while maintaining business and communication goals. This further helps us in building effective and result-oriented acquisition and retention strategies. With the introduction of new platforms and adoption of new technologies, consumer preferences are ever-evolving and can be challenging at times. Hence at BookMyShow, we are working with our internal technology teams and relevant external partners to build on this opportunity, as we continue to keep pace with these new trends. How have you leveraged Data management platforms (DMPs) to gain insights and activate it to drive outcomes, both for marketing and product design? What are the challenges? Data Management Platforms (DMPs) have been instrumental in providing a more refined approach in terms of marketing and product design helping with extremely sharp data collection and utilisation. This has helped us improve marketing automation with the help of actions that are data-driven and have been collected through the platform. . On the basis of customer behaviour and feedback, these platforms also provide us with effective segmentation and insights, which in turn help in cost-conscious acquisition and retention of millions of our customers. Keeping up with the pace of the ad-tech evolution happening across various platforms on mobile eco-systems is a challenge that we are working towards overcoming. This is a partner content article in association with exchange4media