marketing trends Archives - Datahash https://www.datahash.com No-Code First Party Data Management Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:44:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.datahash.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/datahash-favicon-100x100.png marketing trends Archives - Datahash https://www.datahash.com 32 32 Marketers Measure Success Differently Owing to Data Privacy Updates https://www.datahash.com/marketers-measure-success-differently-owing-to-data-privacy-updates/ https://www.datahash.com/marketers-measure-success-differently-owing-to-data-privacy-updates/#respond Thu, 13 Jul 2023 09:20:09 +0000 https://www.datahash.com/?p=22124 There could not be a better time to be an online marketer. The world of marketing is evolving at a fast pace. As per reports, 80% of marketers lead their customer experience initiatives across the business, while 94% of marketers […]

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There could not be a better time to be an online marketer. The world of marketing is evolving at a fast pace. As per reports, 80% of marketers lead their customer experience initiatives across the business, while 94% of marketers globally view the marketing function as critical to drive growth.  

A recent report by Salesforce studied over 2,500 global marketing professionals along with their businesses. The report revealed that marketers today are under pressure to optimize and prove their marketing ROI in a tough environment of digital privacy policy. All this while also keeping with the constant operating challenge of organizing and accessing quality data.

Today, marketers aspire to build a cross-channel view that provides a holistic view while enabling speed to insight and rapid decisions at the pace of their business. Reports show that marketers rely on data to inform and create personalized, trusted customer experience – all of which is directed to maximize ROI.  

Privacy Changes Have Led to A Significant Shift in Marketing Strategies & Investments

In the last couple of years, data privacy regulations – GDPR, Apple Mail Privacy Protection, and the deprecation of third-party cookies by Google have pushed marketers to adopt a consent-based route to collecting data. 90% of marketers agree that recent data privacy changes have fundamentally changed how they measure marketing performance.

Focus on Data Quality

Marketers need to know that they can rely on the data being collected to drive outcomes. Four In five marketers indicate that data quality is crucial to driving marketing-led growth and customer experiences.  

But not everyone has access to a reliable data foundation nor the ability to unlock it. Marketers say employee resources and manual data integration are top challenges in efficiently evaluating performance. Though marketers are investing in analytics technology, only 51% of marketing teams currently have employees dedicated to analytics, according to the marketing report.

A Centralized View of Data

Reports suggest that 98% of marketers emphasize the importance of having a complete, centralized view across all cross-channel marketing. Marketers are required to integrate data across business units and sources while also being able to generate and deliver value. A unified data view allows marketers to lead growth in their organizations while engaging with customers.

  1. 90% of marketers plan to either increase or maintain investments in marketing analytics
  2. 88% of marketers plan to either increase or maintain investments in customer data platforms
  3. 87% of marketers plan to either increase or maintain investments in real-time interaction and personalization  

Source Credit: Salesforce

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Value of First-Party Data Activation for ECommerce Businesses https://www.datahash.com/value-of-first-party-data-activation-for-ecommerce-businesses/ https://www.datahash.com/value-of-first-party-data-activation-for-ecommerce-businesses/#respond Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:35:38 +0000 https://www.datahash.com/?p=22011 The third-party cookie demise resulted in the loss of identifiers and identity resolution. However, businesses across the board, especially e-commerce, are self-correcting by re-directing investments from third-party data platforms to first-party initiatives.    The Ability to Collect Data Within Compliance Norms   […]

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The third-party cookie demise resulted in the loss of identifiers and identity resolution. However, businesses across the board, especially e-commerce, are self-correcting by re-directing investments from third-party data platforms to first-party initiatives.   

The Ability to Collect Data Within Compliance Norms  

The first dilemma for marketers is the ability to collect data ethically in keeping with compliance mandates set forth by the regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. A good first-party data collection solution is expected to take care of this process along with compliance requirements.

The benefit of focusing on first-party data is that it enables businesses to create personalized experiences for their user base and get direct insights into the customer’s product interest while creating personalized experiences for them. Because first-party data is owned by the business itself, it will have control over the data being collected.

While many understand that first-party data can inform advertising, there are other ways to use this data to power an e-commerce business. As information that is unique to the business itself, first-party data can inform everything from products and pricing to branding. For example, e-commerce marketers will know exactly how a customer interacts with a brand and its products and this allows for dynamic pricing catered to a specific consumer.

Effectively Target & Personalize with First-Party Data

First-party data allows e-commerce businesses to carry out in-depth targeting based on customer demography, preferences, payment methods, discounts, behavioral characteristics, Add to Carts, SKUs, purchasing frequency, and so on and so forth. This allows the marketer to identify, create specific target groups and personalize advertisements directed to the user.

With first-party data, you will be able to identify customers based on their transaction history. This is in addition to identification based on the type of vendor they prefer – credit, debit, UP etc.  

Let’s break this down further as we go over a few Use Cases

Ability to Target & Help Cart Abandons

There are instances where customers add products to their cart but don’t check out. Access to first-party data helps you identify these customers and connect with them via e-mails, calls, Ads.

Positively Reinforce ‘Friendly Payers’

Certain customers who are regulars prefer a particular mode of payment. You can group these customers with their transaction mode – Credit, Debit, UP, or Net Banking. You can then send them a regular appreciation email or even targeted ads with relevant offers with their preferred mode of payment.  

Segregate users based on buyer demographics 

E-commerce marketers usually study buyer demographics – where users in a certain demographic tend to buy a particular product more often. This is usually influenced by buying trends and more.

Access to first-party data allows you to identify the most bought items for a particular region in the last 30 days. Send targeted Ads to let customers know when a product is back in stock and even re-target customers who like to purchase a certain item.

Lead with Loyalty Programs 

Brands implementing a loyalty program on their e-commerce website or mobile app can reap benefits in collecting first-party data. In such cases, customers are extremely motivated to engage with the brand to provide additional personal information that they would have otherwise avoided giving. Earning rewards and benefits can also appeal to passive audiences also to shop repeatedly on the website. Incentives for website specific events like subscribing to the newsletter, completing a quiz, or their personal profile are becoming increasingly popular for brands running a loyalty program.

 

Why Ecommerce Marketers Love First-Party Data

Using first-party data you can personalize an eCommerce experience for customers far more easily. With second or third-party data you risk bumping your head against the constraints of how that data was collected. It comes from another organization whose goals will never align 100% with your own. If you want a job done right, do it yourself.

When brands show they are responsible for data collection and are using it to provide better shopping experiences, customers are inclined to assist with sharing more about themselves. With stricter government laws and data privacy regulations in place. Brands should prioritize the implementation of consent mechanisms that allow customers to opt into experiences of their choice.

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How First-Party Data Has a Crucial Role to Play in Digital Commerce https://www.datahash.com/how-first-party-data-has-a-crucial-role-to-play-in-digital-commerce/ https://www.datahash.com/how-first-party-data-has-a-crucial-role-to-play-in-digital-commerce/#respond Sun, 07 May 2023 18:45:18 +0000 https://www.datahash.com/?p=21804 Digital Commerce has seen significant uptake. According to 86% of surveyed leaders – digital commerce will be the most important route to market in the next two years.   Most CMOs report that they met or exceeded digital commerce revenue […]

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Digital Commerce has seen significant uptake. According to 86% of surveyed leaders – digital commerce will be the most important route to market in the next two years.  

Most CMOs report that they met or exceeded digital commerce revenue and profitability targets last year, which reflects an unusually favorable operating environment. This creates a challenging outlook for CMOs. There will be pressure to sustain performance and deliver incremental results, even as customer preferences and behaviors continue to evolve in the direction of a “hybrid” mix of digital self-service and in-person experiences.  

The last few years have shown a significant period of change and disruption to customer purchase journeys, behaviours, and expectations. This has resulted in significant digital commerce growth on a global scale at an accelerated pace. Seventy-seven percent of leaders surveyed agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic forced their organizations to set up an online presence and launch digital commerce in a short amount of time. Across business models, organizations are most commonly leveraging digital-first innovations and direct-to-customer platforms to meet customers’ needs for digital commerce.

The Digital Commerce Outlook Will Be Challenging for CMOs

While consumers anticipate that many of their new habits will outlast the pandemic, they are also eager to return to a “hybrid” mode of engaging with brands both digitally and offline.

Consumers miss various aspects of the in-store experience, such as casually browsing products, exploring and trying out products in person, and finding deals. It’s safe to assume that customer purchase habits will continue to evolve, with customers shifting back to previous sales channels, causing a dip in digital commerce sales channel penetration.

This will vary depending on the customer and the industry. Nonetheless, it creates a challenging budgeting and planning situation for CMOs:

• B2C organizations have a challenging outlook, as an already extremely crowded and competitive space will become more intense. Leaders surveyed expect this to continue as they compete for customers’ attention and share of wallet.

• B2B organizations are mostly in a phase of digitizing pre-existing routes to market, and their challenge is to stay ahead of competitors who are also evolving their digital commerce strategies. They also need to think about how they leverage demand generation and marketing tactics to drive more value from new and existing customers. Executive leaders are well aware of the shifting digital commerce customer and market dynamics in 2021.

They recognize that this growth and performance was a given based on the customer shift from traditional to digital commerce channels. In fact, despite large meeting or exceeding commercial targets, only 27% of surveyed marketing leaders reported that they exceeded their senior leaders’ performance expectations for revenue and profitability.

Surveyed leaders agree that they haven’t future-proofed their organization. 37% believe they have the necessary digital commerce capabilities to be successful in the future in terms of talent, partners, process, and operations (best practices, technology, and analytics). Specifically, respondents reported that they need to evolve their digital commerce capabilities to produce more tangible digital commerce results. In doing so, they will also need to wrestle with the transformational aspects of digital commerce.

To close the gap between high expectations and future performance, CMOs need to socialize the challenging commercial outlook with other senior leaders. By jointly setting expectations through robust commercial scenario planning and creating a roadmap to evolve digital commerce capabilities, the target expectation-perception gap can be closed.

First-Party Data: A Strong Arm for CMOs

The significance of first-party data is its ability to help businesses truly understand their customers and build an accurate customer profile to improve relationships along every aspect of the customer journey. Winning in digital commerce in today’s uber-competitive online marketplace starts with having a top-notch e-commerce data strategy that can lead to offering personalized commerce experiences for your loyal customers. Ensuring that your marketing strategy is a data-driven strategy is arguably the most important step in optimizing your marketing efforts for your e-commerce business.

Lead with Loyalty Programs

Brands implementing a loyalty program on their e-commerce website or mobile app can reap benefits in collecting first-party data. In such cases, customers are extremely motivated to engage with the brand to provide additional personal information that they would have otherwise avoided giving. Earning rewards and benefits can also appeal to passive audiences also to shop repeatedly on the website. Incentives for website-specific events like subscribing to the newsletter, completing a quiz or their personal profile are becoming increasingly popular for brands running a loyalty program.

Build emotional bonds with your audience

Customers often feel connected with brands that understand their needs and cater to them continually. It is the brands’ responsibility to ensure that customer feedback is always considered and acted upon to deliver higher customer satisfaction. When brands engage with customers across social media, email, mobile apps, and retail channels, the expectation is to provide a highly individualized shopping experience taking past behavior and purchase history as well as purchase intention into consideration.

Brands should think about using all the intelligence collected from e-commerce channels and applying it to other channels in real-time to provide a highly individualized experience. A simple strategy could be to implement a mobile Wallet solution that creates new ways for shoppers to shop from their mobile devices. Delivering personalized digital coupons or updates about in-store events or having a digital loyalty card makes the shopping experience extremely seamless as customers switch between online and offline channels.

Impact on E-commerce

When brands show they are responsible with data collection and are using it to provide better shopping experiences, customers are inclined to assist with sharing more about themselves. With stricter government laws and data privacy regulations in place, Brands should prioritize the implementation of consent mechanisms that allow customers to opt into experiences of their choice.

E-commerce brands like Amazon, Sephora, and Expedia have implemented customer-centric loyalty programs that provide not only benefits to customers but also a great shopping experience that has in turn helped brands retain their customers. Sephora allows customers to take a quiz on the website or complete their profile and get additional points as well as personalized recommendations. Hudson Bay, Canada’s iconic department store, asks customers to provide information about their body type to provide best-fit recommendations without being creepy.  

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How CMOs Can Deliver Value in a Post-Third-Party Cookie Era https://www.datahash.com/how-cmos-can-deliver-value-in-a-post-third-party-cookie-era/ https://www.datahash.com/how-cmos-can-deliver-value-in-a-post-third-party-cookie-era/#respond Sun, 07 May 2023 17:59:36 +0000 https://www.datahash.com/?p=21770 Those in Chief Marketing roles are often given the responsibility to lead the way to revenue growth in 2023 despite stressors like inflation, supply chain constraints, and more. In any economically stressful situation, the first aspect to be tackled in […]

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Those in Chief Marketing roles are often given the responsibility to lead the way to revenue growth in 2023 despite stressors like inflation, supply chain constraints, and more. In any economically stressful situation, the first aspect to be tackled in any organization is marketing budgets This also threatens the marketer’s ability to deliver value.

Evaluate versions of the Marketing budget to see what KPIs they meet and not just ROI

CMOs often assume that ROI is the best metric to prove marketing’s value to the enterprise. But relying on ROI alone may harm marketing’s ability to deliver against a broader set of enterprise goals. Enterprises also care about market share, profitability, sustainability, and so on.

To build a value case for marketing, CMOs should instead leverage the broader concept of return on objectives to show how marketing investments deliver against a diverse set of goals. Evaluate budgets across multiple metrics to stimulate dialogue about trade-offs, such as revenue versus margin growth, short-term versus long-term growth, and growth for one product line versus another.

Marketers are better able to maximize returns when they evaluate multiple scenarios, including those that look forward to using the predictive models available with marketing mix modelling and which include a simulation interface or tool.

Explore Marketing Investment Triggers

Marketing teams should identify triggers that signal when conditions change, and they need to revisit their strategic plan. Triggers improve planning in two ways.

They: 1. Ensure plans stay relevant by prompting a review when assumptions fail to hold up

2. Spark the need for investments when in-market behavior exceeds a predefined threshold Example triggers include:

• Loss of market share

• Decreases in product consideration

• Increases in competitor spending

• Declines in new customer value

• Increased acquisition costs

• Erosion of conversion rates

Conditions may still require CMOs to reduce their spending. These cuts can hurt, especially when they impact staff and contractors who’ve made real contributions to your marketing performance.

When evaluating the trade-offs needed to cut budgets, consider three strategies: Think long term

A study on the budgeting decisions made during the last global recession found that winners in six of 11 industries took proactive budget cuts which enabled them to accelerate growth investments when conditions eased.

Reprioritize

Many marketing teams overinvest in legacy processes and skills. Use cuts as an opportunity to accelerate simplification, consolidation, automation, and outsourcing decisions. Focus training on new skills needed to advance your team, such as experimentation, enabling them to update assumptions and reveal areas for improvement.

Reinforce triggers

A study on the budgeting decisions made establishing “clawback” triggers reinforces the importance of marketing by establishing conditions under which to make considered investment reductions.

Marketers Struggle to Prove & Measure Marketing ROI

Some of the main challenges in proving marketing ROI include attributing social and content to revenue, aligning KPIs to business goals, attributing leads to revenue, gathering and analysing the right set of data, lack of reliable data, determining the right KPIs to measure, lack of technology resources, lack of expertise, navigating the post cookie world, tying social activities to business outcomes, engaging buyers in a competitive media landscape, implementing the right marketing effectiveness solution and the like.  

Marketing leaders need to start gauging their business’ potential to measure ROI and then identify and alleviate any roadblocks to success. They need to speak about their numbers and data in a way that is understood by the key stakeholders and can help the company make informed and critical business decisions.  

It’s important to avoid vanity metrics because they can mislead you into determining your ROI like page views, email subscribers, leads in the sales funnel, total customers acquired, monthly revenue per customer etc. Instead focus on actionable metrics which are pivotal indicators of your business-like converting users, conversion rate, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, email opt-in conversion rate, cohort assessment of sales funnel and the like.  

Leveraging data is critical for your ROI because it helps you understand what your customers are looking for and need. Due to constantly changing customer behaviour, marketing loss touched an all-time high, but it can be reduced through a 360º view of all of your data. Collecting data and analyzing it lets you assess what’s working, what isn’t, and the next steps. In fact, there must be a good data strategy that aligns with your business goals. Use data to extrapolate the needs, demands, expectations, and interests of your customer and their behaviour. You can discover customer expectations through surveys, developing customer personas, social listening, touchpoint maps, journey maps, predictive analysis, segmentation etc.  

Tools and technology should be used to maximize ROI. CRM systems have become an omnipresent and essential technology for modern marketers. Ensure that every campaign has a tracking code, that measures some results that can be quantified (leads if not revenue). And ask your team to include variable budgets in your CRM system.

Some research recommends that the average buyer touches 10-20 pieces of content before making a buying decision. ‘Multi-Touch Attribution’ can help assign value across multiple campaigns. This could require special tools and skills, but some common approaches are ‘first-touch’ (assigning all value to the first campaign that touches a buyer), ‘last touch,’ or ‘weighted’ where some level of attribution is applied across all marketing campaigns that touch the buyer.

Maximizing ROI isn’t that difficult to accomplish provided you have your business goals aligned with your efforts. With careful planning and by implementing well-curated strategies, you will be able to yield enough ROI as a marketer to drive your business success.  

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In Focus: Marketing Trends 2023 https://www.datahash.com/in-focus-marketing-trends-2023/ https://www.datahash.com/in-focus-marketing-trends-2023/#respond Sun, 07 May 2023 17:47:38 +0000 https://www.datahash.com/?p=21761 Marketers face scrutiny over their operations as the third-party demise takes a stronger foothold in the digital ecosystem. A study by Gartner reveals five trends that will catch-on in the next few years. By the year 2025, organizations that use […]

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Marketers face scrutiny over their operations as the third-party demise takes a stronger foothold in the digital ecosystem. A study by Gartner reveals five trends that will catch-on in the next few years.

By the year 2025, organizations that use AI in the marketing function will shift 75% of their operations from production to analytics.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that use AI across the marketing function will shift 75% of their staff’s operations from production to more strategic activities. Using AI in marketing operations will reduce friction and eliminate redundancy, allowing marketers to shift their budgets and resources to activities that support a more dynamic marketing organization.

For example, marketers can leverage AI in the creative process to automate the capturing, processing, and analyzing of real-world images and videos, improving image quality and developing digital twins.

AI will continue to refine marketing operations processes to drive more agile, data-based responses to the challenges ahead that have no signs of slowing down.

Marketing as a role will evolve to combat misinformation

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 80% of enterprise marketers will establish a dedicated content authenticity function to combat misinformation and fake material. The volume of generative AI and user-generated content (UGC), and the unpredictable nature of today’s digital content ecosystem pose a challenge.   

Marketing will redeploy a portion of their media budget to product placement

Gartner predicts that by 2024, 70% of brands will redeploy at least 10% of their media budget to product placement in entertainment content. The reality is, consumers have advertisement fatigue and those with means that can afford to opt out of ads, do so.

Marketing will establish a loyalty program to retain high-priority customers

Gartner predicts that one in three businesses without a loyalty program today will establish one by 2027 to shore up first-party data collection and retain high-priority customers. Loyalty programs are an effective strategy to reward customers and collect critical data for personalization and enhancing customer experiences.   

Marketing will be accountable for ethical AI

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of enterprise CMOs will identify accountability for ethical AI in marketing among their top concerns. Privacy-related restrictions on data collection, economic pressures, and AI breakthroughs are driving marketing teams to rely more heavily on AI and machine learning to optimize campaign performance and lower costs.  

In the absence of third-party cookies, strong content will become even more critical. Offering engaging and high-quality content builds credibility with users and increases the likelihood that they will share additional data, so it’s worth getting it right from the get-go. Strong content gives you control before it reaches the channel you’re utilizing. Whether it’s written, audio, or video content, content sharing augments your stockpile of first-party data.

Ultimately, content experience is what enables customers to find what they are  seeking—somewhat like a store map. And timing is key. When you invest in creating content that’s relevant to the context, especially in relation to where customers are in their journey, and send it immediately—you’re increasing the likelihood that personalization happens in real-time when customers need it most.  

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