What Future-Forward Marketers Know – And You Should Too

Guest post by Steve Zisk, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, RedPoint

As today’s consumers take the lead in designing their own customer journeys, smart marketers need to understand three core issues to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace. Below I outline these areas that you need to understand and deliver on the expectations of modern consumers.

Constant Balance Between Personalization and Privacy – Personalization is now table stakes for marketers because it drives customer loyalty, which is why according to research from a Harris Poll survey sponsored by RedPoint Global, 37 percent of consumers will stop doing business with a brand that fails to offer a personalized experience. Data also shows two-thirds of customers expect transparency and control over collection, use, and sharing of their personal data. While transparency is a top priority, most consumers also understand that data drives personalization in a modern, omnichannel world and 54 percent will willingly share personal data in exchange for a more relevant experience.

Continued Need to Break Down Silos – While more marketers understand the risk of siloed data, the recent CDP Report from The Relevancy Group shows that 56 percent of marketers have yet to implement a comprehensive data solution and 14 percent are not yet convinced of the need. Marketers stymied by siloed customer data have little insight into potential opportunities or problems that customers’ seemingly disconnected interactions may signal. It is necessary to integrate this data to create a single point of control for customer data, processes, insights and orchestration if marketers expect to meet the requirements of today’s omnichannel consumer.

Rationalize Approach to MarTech & AdTech – Marketers continue to look for a “silver bullet” solution that will meet all their marketing goals, but they may chase solutions that meet only specific and current short-term needs, often as adjuncts to marketing cloud promises to simplify marketer workflow and control the technology stack. Instead of depending on a (someday) unified stack from a single vendor, marketers should consider CDPs to help their organizations abstract, analyze, control, optimize and orchestrate their data. CDPs can be a smart investment to best drive revenue today, while providing a base for harmonizing existing and emerging technologies in designing new customer experiences.

Key Priorities for Leading Marketing Organizations

Guest post by Ryan Greene, ActionIQ

Leading marketing organizations prioritize these three principles:

1. Integrate one’s technology stack. Research shows nearly 7 of 10 consumers will transact with another brand due to a disconnected experience (source). Leaders should prioritize establishing a single customer view that contains all of their customers’ historical interactions, while making it available to all customer facing solutions across marketing, service, and commerce channels. Leaders should also prioritize connecting their non-customer systems for efficiencies too (e.g. content management solution, workflow management solution, etc.). Manual processes and incomplete customer intelligence consistently undermine innovation.
2. Enable data democracy. There’s no faster way to scale customer intelligence and employee productivity than to put the power of data in your workforce’s hands. In fact, McKinsey says personalization is impossible if marketers don’t have the means to understand the needs of customers on an ongoing basis (source). Leading organizations fully democratize access to data, insights, and analytics.
3. Activate, measure, and iterate. No matter how super one’s intuition is, it should never be considered a substitute for ideation, testing, and iteration. For example, McKinsey research finds it typically takes four to five refinements of a personalized trigger to capture the first 80 percent of its potential value (source), underscoring the value of testing and iteration. Leaders should instill a culture of testing by gaining executive sponsorship, creating performance goals, and following testing best practices.

Three Things Smart Marketers Need to Know for the Future of Marketing

Guest post by Sam Ngo, Director of Product Marketing at BlueConic

Smart marketing leaders are putting the customer at the center of their marketing infrastructure. With new privacy regulations and an ever-changing data landscape, brands need to own their relationships with customers and customers need to have transparency and control over their data. While many marketers fear new privacy regulations, companies should embrace it. It’s an opportunity to rethink the data they currently collect and decide what data is actually helping them build mutually beneficial experiences for the customer and the business.

Companies must build out their first-party data assets now. As third-party data becomes less reliable, companies need to leverage a customer data platform (CDP) to empower their marketing team with their own customer database; or risk falling behind competitors who are already evolving their practices and infrastructure. While many brands collect first-party data today, some struggle to free that data from disparate systems and channel-specific silos. With the right CDP, you can consolidate all of the data from your CRM, ESP, and other online and offline data sources into one, centralized location and use that data for real-time marketing efforts. Companies that have first-party data at their fingertips can leverage a single view of the customer to create valuable 1:1 experiences for their customers and prospects at every touchpoint.

Authentication, consent, and value exchange are core to customer identity. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen privacy and compliance regulations evolve at a rapid clip. Customer expectations are rising, and new privacy regulations are being passed – creating a new normal for marketers. Marketers will have to explicitly ask for permission to gather customer data and use it to inform marketing and customer experiences. To operate in this new normal, marketers must anchor customer identity with:

• Authentication: As cookie data becomes less reliable thanks to ITP and other browser tracking changes, companies must ask explicitly ask individuals to identify themselves in order for companies to accurately recognize them across channels – including offline ones. Create experiences where customers want to identify themselves quickly so you can understand their behaviors and offer personalized experiences and specific value exchanges.
• Consent: New privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA require you to ask for consent for what you can do with an individual’s data. How you present these requests, however, is up to you.
• Value exchange: Customers are willing to give you data – but only if they get something in return. In fact, it’s not that different from the idea of building loyalty programs. Brands will need to find creative ways to collect data and give customers something of value in return.

AI for marketing. A truly effective individualized marketing approach requires not just a complete understanding of who each prospect or customer is now, but also the ability to predict how those individuals are likely to engage with you in the future. As a CDP that embeds Jupyter notebooks for the purposes of predictive modeling within the platform, BlueConic makes it possible for marketers to use the outcome of these models for segmentation, analytics, and real-time customer scoring. Not only does this eliminate operational inefficiencies by reducing the number of hand-offs between marketing and data science & BI teams, it also allows marketers to design experiences based on a combination of customer attributes including predictive customer scores and various behavioral, transactional, or preferential data.

MQ Issue 22: CDP Buyer’s Guide Excerpt, Jersey Mike’s CMO Featured

Our 22nd issue of the Marketer Quarterly is now live!

The issue features an excerpt from The Relevancy Group’s 2019 CDP Buyer’s Guide, which profiles many of the leading CDPs in the industry.

The issue also includes A Day in the Life of Jersey Mike’s CMO Rich Hope and an interview with Chemistry’s Trevar Mazza.

Explore Land O’Lakes’ new digital video effort celebrating modern women farmers and learn how Coca-Cola and Baskin Robbins are marketing to cord cutters on Netflix.

The issue is free with registration.

Google’s Face Match Employs Facial Recognition

Google has introduced Face Match, a new facial recognition technology that is a part of Google Nest Hub Max.

The technology uses a front-facing camera for video calls and access to your personal data. So for instance, you can access your photos, texts and your calendar when it scans and recognizes your face.

The company said it was not a security feature and may accidentally open if a family member that looks like you scans their face or even a photo of you might work.

The company did not say how it would store the data or if it would use the information for marketing or customer profiling.

MQ 21: ESP Buyer’s Guide, Visa, ANGI Services CMO & More

Our 21st issue of the Marketer Quarterly is now live!

The issue features an excerpt from our 2019 ESP Buyer’s Guide, which profiles many of the leading ESPs in the industry.

The issue also includes A Day in the Life of ANGI Services Allison Lowry and an interview with Boarding Pass NYC’s Mike Arnot.

Explore Visa’s new digital effort empowering women and how the United Way is using shocking imagery to grab attention and increase graduation rates.

The issue is free with registration.

The Marketer Quarterly Is Now Live

Our 20th issue of the Marketer Quarterly is now live!

The issue features our fourth annual 2018 awards,  which highlights some of the best marketing of the year. We are pleased to profile work from 23 leading brands.

The issue also includes A Day in the Life of TrueBlue CMO Maggie Lower and an interview with Macy’s Group Vice President of Marketing Strategy Abigail James.

Explore Williams-Sonoma’s Peppermint Bark anniversary campaign and how Macy’s is using Instagram, among other deep dives.

The issue is free with registration.

Coca-Cola Partners With Snapchat in U.K. Holiday Effort

Coca-Cola is putting Coke Zero as the star in its U.K. holiday campaign “Holidays are Coming,” a new direction for the effort which is usually focused on the classic product.

The effort includes a partnership with Snapchat and LadBible, a move to reach a younger demographic.

The campaign includes a Snapchat lens that explores how “Holidays are Coming” became so iconic. The lens features branded content from hip publisher LADbible.

The brand is also running its first-ever on-pack promotion at Capital’s Jingle Bell Ball, which will be supported through a social media effort.

In addition, the beverage maker has created a new limited-edition cinnamon flavor Coke Zero. Coca-Cola has made the Oxford Circus Underground station in London “cinnamon-scented” to get consumers to experience the flavor first hand.