In contrast to physical retail outlets, e-commerce platforms can support a more comprehensive marketing and sales campaign for brands. For instance, our presence in Morocco has underpinned online sales for various local and global brands, but we've always believed we can do more than facilitate the final exchange of goods for money.
Accordingly, we examined various facets of our marketplace, such as the user interface, consumers’ shopping patterns, vendors' offers, and other elements that influence the attention and sales of various brands. In 2018, we set up a new offering for sellers called Jumia Advertising to provide a more streamlined and effective experience for brands seeking more exposure.
Harmonizing Jumia Advertising with seller objectives
One of the main challenges in increasing adoption for Jumia Advertising has been the varying goals of different sellers. Some brands want more visibility for specific products, while others want to advertise their entire line of products. Other brands want seasonal advertising as opposed to those that want year-long advertising.
Furthermore, some brands intend to enrich the feedback loop through techniques like teasers, pre-orders, samples and more. And remember, many of these brands have already tried numerous online and offline options like social media ads, print media, billboards and more.
Therefore, one of our first major efforts was to create off-the-shelf packages detailing how a brand will be presented on our platform (homepage, category banners, brand section, suggestions, push notifications and more), the duration, exposure range, price and other vital metrics. We then converged all these into a digital dashboard where sellers could easily select their preferred option.
Essentially, this approach goes beyond simplifying the seller’s experience when setting up ads. It enables them to pinpoint a strategy, meticulously track its progress and make changes where needed. Additionally, sellers learn about our seasonal offers in advance and prepare to participate in Anniversary sales, Back-to-School discounts, Black Friday promotions, Ramadan offers, and more.
Outside digitization, we enable brand representatives to reach out to designated people in our team regarding any particular requests they have beyond the scope of what’s in our platform’s in-built offers. Consequently, we help with actions like attaching samples to customers' packages and getting feedback to relay to the brand reps once customers tried out these samples.
This relationship management approach has been even more beneficial when catering to advertisers who aren’t sellers on our platform, such as banks, automobile dealers and more. While our marketplace garnered over five million monthly page views, we knew we could go further with the value we offer. Through continuous interactions with representatives of such brands, we ascertained their ideal target audience and tailored advertising packages to them.
The goal is to determine who amongst our customers is most likely to be interested in buying the product of a particular company that doesn’t sell on our platform. The answer may lie in the other products they look at or buy, the amount of money they spend, and several other data points. More importantly, we keep listening to the brand representatives about any changes in their buyer demographics and optimize the strategy so they can tap into new segments.
Achievements, learnings and goals
Since we started offering Jumia Advertising to brands in Morocco, we’ve made it easier and more affordable for small brands to achieve greater awareness in the market. We've also helped increase consumer confidence in small and large brands through efforts like the official store status.
Jumia Advertising helps to ensure that customers are more likely to see relevant offers, thereby improving their shopping experience by shortening the time to find a product that fits their buying criteria. Along the way, we’ve noticed that advertising can be tricky to execute when serving brands in direct competition.
This is why our offering has evolved to zero in on the subtler differences between consumers to understand who’s more likely to buy from a specific electronics or cosmetics brand and who leans more towards their competitor. Subsequently, we can point each brand to the strategy with the highest chance of success, whether targeting price-sensitive consumers or those who prioritize style and design, among other product attributes.
Ultimately, our team continues simplifying the process of setting up, tracking and refining advertising campaigns within Jumia’s broader ecosystem while ensuring maximum value for brands and consumers by expanding the intersection between targeted hyper-visibility and relevant offers.
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Mirale Tazi
Regional Director Advertising Maghreb, Jumia Morocco
Mirale Tazi is an accomplished advertising professional and the Head of Advertising and Regional Director Advertising Maghreb for Jumia Morocco. She began her career in 2014 with the advertising agency of Telquel, where she developed her expertise in digital marketing while working on Telquel.ma, Ilaiki.ma the Arabic version of Telquel.ma.
In 2018, Mirale joined Jumia Morocco to launch its advertising agency - Jumia Advertising. Her leadership skills, strategic thinking, and customer-centric approach led her to be promoted to Head of Advertising for Jumia Morocco in 2019. In this role, she oversaw all aspects of advertising strategy, planning, and execution for Jumia Morocco.