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.

The new privacy legislation, the elimination of third-party cookies, and the development of tracking protection are moving publishers to reconsider data collection strategies. While first-party data collection is the most straightforward strategy that publishers can employ to keep up with changes – it is crucial to understand first-party data as an alternative.

The biggest challenge for media houses will be to execute a first-party data strategy that integrates with data-driven subscription, registration and  operations. All this while adhering to privacy regulations to retain the customer’s trust.  

The Crucial Role of First-Party Data

Early adoption of first party data can help publishers be independent while building deeper relationships with customers and contribute to sustainable growth through multiple revenue streams.

Digital Customer Engagement can be described as proactive interactions conducted by a brand via digital channels to boost engagement and build relationships through the buyer’s journey. Being in touch with the customer has never held more importance than in today’s digital age, and businesses are on the lookout for innovative ways to connect with customers. Hence, this lays immense focus on the ability to conduct multi-channel marketing, to connect user experience while offline and online.  

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.

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

The need for first-party data is increasing as the third-party cookie demise continues to limit the ability of brands and marketers to deliver personalized experiences. According to the State of Personalization Report, 62% of customers expect personalization. The report found that 78% of brands in Asia and Japan rely on third-party data for their marketing strategies.

Through support touchpoints, brands can prepare and move away from third-party data dependencies by capturing customer interactions and tuning into their consumer market’s directly-expressed needs, interests, and concerns.

Data collected from CRM benefits customer-facing departments in brands such as marketing, sales, and support. First-party data can help analyze, improve, and accelerate the outreach effort through informed decisions or identify opportunities for businesses

Define your target customers   

Even a novice businessperson understands the significance of determining a target audience. Your target group is built around your ideal customer profile, that being the customers your products and solutions can help the most and that make the most purchases. While designing a loyalty program and collecting data, you need to have a deeper understanding of who you’re designing your program for, who is most likely to participate, and what essential data you need to know about each of these individuals. Once you define your target customers, you’ll need to define your goals, including what actions you want customers to perform more often. Really knowing your customers will help you identify what kinds of engagement activities your target customers may prefer as well as inspire ways to improve the customer experience.

Determine why you need data

True, data is an essential component required to understand customer purchase patterns, preferences, and behavior but it is important to determine specifically why you need it and how it can help your business grow. This helps ensure you don’t collect unnecessary data that you don’t really need and most likely won’t use. Your reasons for collect data may vary from increasing brand reach to improving retention rate. When you have definite reasons to collect data, you know what kind of specific information or data you require and can design a loyalty program accordingly. Learn more about the types of customer data and collection tips.

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.

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.