With the markets as saturated as ever, we all want to beat the competition and hit the ground running in 2023. If you’re a marketer and you’re already looking for ways to stay one step ahead next year, then you’ve come to the right place. Here are our top five key areas to focus on if you want to increase efficiency and reach the full potential of your marketing team next year.
- Purpose
Today’s consumers are increasingly looking to make an impact with what they spend their money on, and lately they’ve been prioritising sustainability. They aren’t looking to make an impact on their own, though – they want brands to help them make sustainable choices, and are more likely to choose brands that align with their values and goals. According to Deloitte’s recent Gen Z and Millennial Survey 2022, 90% of Gen Zs and millennials are making an effort to reduce their environmental impact, and 64% of Gen Zs would pay more for a product if it was environmentally sustainable. In fact, consumers of all ages say that when it comes to making purchase decisions, a brand’s values are important or very important to them, with 40% actively researching a brand’s values and practices.
As a response to this, more and more brands are taking a closer look at their environmental impact and actively highlighting causes that are important to them, from animal welfare to supporting the arts. One of the best examples of this has been the clothing brand Patagonia. Earlier this year, the founder of the company gave it away, effectively turning it into a non-profit and donating all of the organisation’s profits to tackle the climate change crisis.
Our Advice:
- Take care to avoid ‘purpose-washing’ (like greenwashing but for any element of brand purpose, rather than just sustainability). Simply saying you have a purpose isn’t good enough for consumers anymore – they want to know what you’re actually doing. Research by Razorfish showed that 62% of consumers said a brand’s values were important to them, and 40% would do research on a brand, to see if they were delivering on those values.
- If you’re looking to make more sustainable choices in 2023, consider adopting Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud. A platform dedicated to helping organisations to reduce carbon emissions and costs at the same time, Net Zero Cloud has already helped many organisations to accurately track their progress towards their sustainability goals.
- Personalisation
Today’s consumers aren’t just looking for more sustainable options – they’re also looking for a more relevant and personalised experience. According to research by Salesforce, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, while 52% of them expect to always be presented with personalised offers. Amid the current economic crisis, and empowered by technology, customers aren’t always prepared to stick with one retailer – a PwC survey showed 40% of shoppers used comparison sites, and 37% would shop at multiple retailers to find the products they’re after. With customers looking more likely to shop around, brands need to be able to engage with their customers in new and compelling ways if they want to keep their business.
With so many ways that customers can interact with brands offline and online – via email, phone calls, text messages, and the many different social media platforms – brands have far more data on their customers than ever before. By integrating these data sources, brands can better understand their customers’ wants and needs, and offer them a far more personalised experience. With AI and automation technologies, brands are able to predict their customers’ behaviour and offer them products and services they didn’t even realise they needed.
Our Advice:
- Give your customers multiple ways of contacting you. We live in an increasingly connected age, and consumers won’t just use one channel. They’ll use whatever’s most convenient for them at the time. And, if they’re unable to reach you, they may switch to a competitor.
- Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can optimise your campaigns and drive engagement by offering customers a more personalised experience. Not only can it help you track your customers’ moves across different channels, but it can also provide a detailed understanding of their interests by consolidating all your data sources into one simple customer profile. When combined with AI-powered Einstein, it can also provide predictions and recommendations based on your customer’s previous interactions with your brand.
- Inclusive Media Planning
In recent years, pressure has increased for organisations to prioritise inclusion and representation, joining the push towards greater equality and diversity. Before now, this pressure has been focused primarily on the advertising industry. Now, though, it is finally making its way into media. From the publishing industry to the film and television industry, there are calls for change across the media space – particularly when it comes to media planning. Inclusion isn’t just about people being able to see themselves represented in ads – they need to be able to experience these ads in ways and via mediums that are familiar to them. To stop unconscious biases from getting in the way, advertisers need to make sure they’re reflecting the diversity of their audience in their choice of ad placements.
To make sure they’re being as inclusive as possible, brands need to dig deep and find out as much as they can about their audience through thorough market research. A “one size fits all” marketing strategy just won’t work anymore. By rethinking their approach to media planning and carefully selecting placements for their ads, brands can reach more of their audience in a place where they are more likely to convert.
Our Advice:
- Schedule a media planning audit for the new year, taking time to consider the channels and publishers you use. Are you reaching the entirety of your target audience? Are you reaching them in the places they are most comfortable? Are there any keywords, topics or placements that you’ve unknowingly left out?
- Looking for a little tech support with your new media planning strategy? Tools like Media Cloud, Media Planning Center and Marketing Cloud Intelligence (previously known as Datorama) can all help you to gather insights on your audience and act on them. With Media Cloud, in particular, you can create customer profiles and build communities within your audience – this can help make customers feel more included, and can in turn increase overall customer lifetime value (CLV), which can lead to more sales and revenue.
- Customer Loyalty and Advocacy
With budgets tightening for people and businesses alike, brand loyalty is more important than ever – especially when it comes to retaining your clients and customers. According to Merkle’s 2022 Loyalty Barometer Report, 79% of consumers are more likely to choose a brand because of its loyalty program, and say they’re influenced by consistent customer experiences and customer service. This shows that when it comes to building a great relationship with your customers, connection is key. After all, if a customer has some kind of personal connection to a brand, they’re far less likely to switch to a competitor. In a Holiday Shopping Trends survey by Iterable, 83% of those surveyed said that they were more likely to purchase from a brand if they had an emotional connection to it.
The best way to build quality relationships with your customer is to improve their experience with your brand (80% of Salesforce’s customers say experience is just as important as the products and services themselves). Dedicate time and resources to building a loyalty program for your customers to get involved with. If you don’t already have a loyalty program in place, it’s a surefire way of fostering long-term connections with your customers – and gathering more data on them at the same time, helping you to personalise your communications with them and potentially even creating a whole new revenue stream.
Our Advice:
- Incentivise your customers to sign up for and keep using your loyalty scheme by offering them personalised rewards and exclusive deals.
- Platforms like Salesforce’s Loyalty Management help you to set up and manage your loyalty program, configuring it to ensure it fits the exact needs of your customers and integrating it into every step of the customer journey.
- If you’re low on time or resources, don’t throw out the idea of having a loyalty program. Consider outsourcing loyalty management to an agency or specialist, or consider looking into automation to keep your loyalty scheme running without all the manual labour (something the team at Trigg are experts in!).
- Technology & Process Efficiency
The marketing industry can be unpredictable, but there will always be pressure on your teams to produce more content in less time and with fewer resources. With this in mind, marketer time is more precious than ever. The problem is, a lot of marketers’ time is often wasted on inefficient technologies and processes. Are you using way too many platforms to facilitate your daily activities? Could your processes be more streamlined, or even automated?
Any technology that doesn’t help you to do more with less should be phased out. The only technology you should be adopting in your organisation is that which allows you to be more efficient, more streamlined and more successful.
Our Advice:
- Kick off the year by assessing the tools and processes you’re already using. If there are any that don’t help you to be as efficient as you could be, start looking for alternatives.
- Consider automation. Automation is one of the best ways of making your workflow more efficient, and the majority of organisations are already using it to streamline their work and free up their time. At Trigg, our team of experts have years of experience shaping and improving processes that save time, reduce costs, and make you more money. Just give us a shout if you’d like to hear more!
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If you want to find out more about any of the tips and/or tools mentioned in this blog, we can help.
To kick off 2023 with a bang, we’re offering free health checks for the first 5 organisations to reach out to us. As well as making sure you’re able to meet your marketing goals, we’ll identify any opportunities to improve your tech stack and look out for any processes that could be improved or even automated.
Want to be one of those 5 organisations? Get in touch to find out more or sign yourselves up…
+44 203 239 8492
hello@triggdigital.com
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