Things changed for a lot of industries around the world, and though the marketing sector was not immune, it is at the epicentre of all the innovation and seismic shifts that the world is embracing today.
Where once marketing professionals only needed to promote a product or service, they now need to expand their individual skill sets to embrace a level of creativity and analysis that would have been expected from a full team no more than two years ago. They need to stay on top of the constantly changing landscape of the sector, adapting contemporary methods to reach out to today’s consumers.
While the sector is currently at the cusp of another evolutionary transition, there are a number of factors that are consistently affecting the market and that I believe are of absolute relevance towards understanding and embracing the path ahead of us.
The value of social currency
How you interact with your audience and what they feel about you as the brand is important and will continue in the time to come. This makes it important to talk about the concept of social currency and its relevance.
By leveraging the ways people interact, buy, sell, and promote on social media, you grow your brand. To put it simply, the number of followers, likes, comments, shares, and views a brand is valued as social currency. Building social currency promotes a brand’s engagement with consumers and contact with customers and grants access to relevant information that is shared among the customers.
Cutting through the noise and increasing brand exposure across several social media platforms may be getting increasingly challenging, but solid social currency will elevate a brand’s presence and position it ahead of the pack.
A true game-changer
One integral factor that has taken precedence over the past few years is privacy in advertising. In the era of digital marketing, personal data collection and consumers’ digital experience were thought to be intricately interconnected, a fact that is continuously changing.
Today, the matter of security and misuse of personal data is more critical than it ever was, not just for authorities but for the consumers, who are now aware, informed, and increasingly uncomfortable with a brand that deceptively collects data from their day-to-day lives. This apprehension will herald a transformation in how companies treat the privacy of their stakeholders, and if the past few years alone have been any indication, it will be harder and harder to identify if a brand is being more forthright or if it has established another method to covertly continue to collect its information.
The art of data privacy in marketing
In recent years, all the changes relating to data privacy have been particularly impactful for the marketing teams. A recent Gartner research shows that nearly one out of five marketers cite privacy law compliance as their main concern, and this is true across various marketing channels.
Marketing technology investments have been rendered obsolete by this focus on privacy and, resultantly, negatively affected the ability of marketing teams to collect and derive insights from personal data. Given the current climate, marketing professionals believe that privacy concerns will adversely affect their analytics efforts 73% of the time.
Opt for algorithm-driven marketing:
It is the need of the hour for brands and their corresponding marketing teams to cater to their users and deliver upon their needs and concerns. Even though marketers can learn about and target consumers considerably more precisely, as the volume of data increases, so does the difficulty of evaluating it. Facts state that in 2018, around 3.9 billion people were active internet users, a number that Statista predicts will rise to 5.3 billion by 2023.
With such rapidly growing numbers, navigating and learning to decipher algorithms is now becoming a prerequisite for marketing and branding efforts. Breaking down your target audience to simple demographics is no longer a practice of precision as the internet has created a world where we all collectively coexist. The science is now in the data and screened habits of customers that, if collected ethically, will paint a fascinating picture of the future.
But we are just scratching the surface, and we are in a favourable position that invites us to learn and inspire from one another. So, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn to share your thoughts on what you believe will have the biggest impact on the marketing world.
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