As this tumultuous year comes to a close, marketers and digital PR professionals are looking to embrace even more creative and innovative ways to connect with the target audiences, build awareness, find various online touchpoints or add more digital insights to campaigns. With the absence of gatherings worldwide and the traditional workspace decreasing in popularity, marketers should be looking into digital channels more than ever before.
Things are still changing, even right now, which means marketers have to be flexible and focus on providing and maintaining business growth.
Digital marketing strategies will be shifting a lot more towards first-party data, especially since the amount of available cookies is still decreasing. This means the businesses who will be implementing multi-channel data collection, curation, and attribution – all things that have become a lot more affordable in recent times – will be seeing a lot of success. Tools such as chatbots and other conversational assistants that help customers feel more welcomed throughout their buying journeys will be very useful in the coming year.
This trend is also going to be followed by a lot of personalization, as marketers will be interested in more predictive data analytics and marketing automation and CRM, across all platforms like email, websites, and social media platforms. This data and these tolls will allow marketers to create more engaging and relevant ads for the target audiences that are going to grab their attention and guide them to their purchases.
There has been a war on privacy in the past couple of years, which has led to disruption in marketing. Businesses that rely on tracking tools to retarget their ads will be looking into newer technologies that will help them track and attribute conversions. Furthermore, in light of different consumer data privacy regulations in place, businesses will have to utilize a privacy-first culture and take care of their customers’ data.
All of this will affect the entire industry, from advertisers and publishers to consumers, which means if businesses want to provide personalized marketing, they have to shift towards working with publishers to reach that goal.
Marketers are already familiar with the fact that they should be incorporating different channels in their campaigns to make them more effective. In the coming year, there is going to be an even bigger focus on this strategy. To better connect consumers with businesses, marketers should adopt different services such as loyalty programs or introduce automated sequences triggered by some customer interactions, engage the consumers, and lead them to make a purchase.
Furthermore, companies who are looking to retain their customers over the long term should create a streamlined and personalized experience across all available channels in their campaigns. The most successful companies will be the ones who can balance authenticity, social responsibility, and empathy in their marketing campaigns and communicate those efforts through all of their marketing messages.
Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, a leading US PR agency.