As the world around us changes and evolves, so do our customers. Because modern technology has made it possible, nearly anything a customer could want, at any given time, is available on-demand, in real time and often at their fingertips.
It only makes sense that brands follow suit, remain agile, and adjust ways of working and doing business accordingly. This may mean overhauling outdated processes, investing in their web or mobile user experience or finding new ways to leverage the tools already at their disposal, like their customer data.
It’s perhaps for this reason, among others, that despite major concern about the impact of inflation and economic uncertainty, advertising budgets (particularly when it comes to paid search) are still on their way up.
Combat uncertainty with stellar experience
To be exact, as many as 85% of advertisers are highly concerned about the effect inflation will have on their business performance. For enterprises (with a revenue of $500 million-plus), that number jumps as high as 91%.
In June 2022 alone, inflation rose 9.1% (though it does show signs of flattening), leaving many brands asking the same question: How can we scale our success and boost ROI, while accounting for the fact that both our business and consumers face months of uncertainty ahead?
The answer lies in operating with a mindset focused on delivering the best experience for your customers, that can also deliver on your bottom line. Customer-centricity isn’t just about mastering the basics of personalization against traditional segmentation (which is built around third-party demographic data). It’s about thinking beyond that.
Marketing has seen a multi-year shift toward data-driven decisioning: making smarter use of data (and most often, customer data) and technology to evolve business processes and grow business performance beyond what was previously thought possible. Nonetheless, despite brands’ attempts to become first-party data-driven, persistent challenges remain.
View hurdles as opportunities
Primarily, brands struggle in two areas: accessing the data needed to find the right audiences and to build the most effective marketing campaigns that will engage prospects and current customers. Why? Most organizations struggle with maintaining a useful, unified customer view over time. But with the impact of an economic downturn layered on top of these challenges, brands have even more to contend with—and not much time to act.
In fact, 71% of marketers struggle to maintain an accurate, useful consumer ID throughout changes over time, and nearly half of marketers feel that the information they are trying to access (when building the best audiences and powering effective marketing campaigns) is hard to find.
Unprecedented circumstances often force change, and force that change to happen quickly. Now is the time to address your blockers to enable capabilities to power true customer-centricity.
Today, brands face a trifecta of hurdles: the rise of inflation, continuing supply chain issues and the end of third-party cookies—all overlapping. As many as 86% of brands even feel that the way they interact with customers has permanently changed due to the pandemic.
They’re viewing this, however, as an opportunity rather than a threat: one to boost spend on the right drivers and focus their energy on the investments that will yield a worthwhile return.
Build a strategy around first-party data
So, how can brands reclaim their stake in winning, highly and accurately personalized customer experiences for true customer centricity? By using identity resolution to build unified and useful customer profiles based on consented first-party data.
It should come as no surprise that brands investing in the tools needed to gain a deep and meaningful understanding of their customers will be more likely to see success when it comes to meeting those customers where they are, meaning brands can serve them with the right messages, on the right channel, at the right time.
Unifying customer data is among the biggest hurdles for marketers who want to deliver a consistent, personalized experience, but with first party data-driven identity resolution, the engine powering that personalization is always fueled and ready to be leveraged.
When brands use consented first-party data to resolve customer identities, they can merge behavioral history onto those profiles, thus becoming equipped with both reliable, cookieless customer identifiers, and a foundational data set that enables audience segments to be created to activate in their downstream tools.
What’s promising is that brands aren’t shying away from the right investments, even in the face of economic uncertainty. As many as 57% of advertisers are boosting paid search spend. Others are investing in technology or in processes that will move the needle closer to their goal.
If you are not yet on your journey (and even if you are) the right next step is simply to allow your customers to guide you through current murky waters. Your ability to serve them, and efficiently find more customers like them, depends on your ability to truly and meaningfully know them—not just their demographics.
Start by building your first-party data strategy and align your business around the development of truly useful customer profiles for effective campaigns and programs. Your advertising and marketing strategies alike should be powered by the most important data you have—and that should be your focus.
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An executive business leader with a creative flair, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff has built teams that transformed the customer and user experience at Mozilla, BitTorrent, Mindjet, Involver (acquired by Oracle) and Webtrends. In his current role as president of Lytics, Jascha is responsible for go-to-market, customer success and operations.
