4 initiatives to integrate into your 2024 Marketing Plans!

Two trends are starting to appear on the marketing ecosystem horizon for the next few years. Let’s take a closer look!

The evolution of the marketing ecosystem: Trends and challenges

Trend 1: Consumers’ desire to control their personal information

The coming months will bring a number of marketing challenges, particularly due to the application of legislation aiming to protect consumer privacy (Quebec’s Law 25) and the disappearance of third-party cookies announced by Google (in response to the need to manage privacy).

The main impact of these two realities is the difficulty in maintaining or improving return on ad spend (ROAS). From 2021 to 2022, costs related to digital media investments have increased anywhere from 64% to 108% depending on the platform used by advertisers (according to Forbes). This new reality creates one more new pressure on organizations’ business performance added on top of the risk of recession.

Trend 2: Consumer need for a relevant omnichannel experience  

The pandemic led to changes in consumption habits. Offering a unique, relevant omnichannel experience to customers in order to keep them engaged with the brand is a strategic differentiator for companies. Customer and user experience has become a requirement for maintaining a competitive advantage.

To respond to these challenges, we would like to propose a list of initiatives that will let you consistently reach your marketing and business objectives.

Achieving goals: Initiatives and solutions

Initiative 1: Develop a data strategy aligned with your 360 marketing strategy

These days, communicating with users through every point of contact (on- and offline) is the new normal. The ability to establish a 360 omnichannel marketing strategy requires a deep understanding of your customers (and your market) as well as their preferences. This understanding is acquired through data collection, warehousing and analysis. Activating data is a process that needs to be planned out using a  data strategy, which is a plan for adding value to your organization’s data that remains aligned with your business objectives.

The data strategy must take into consideration the disappearance of persistent identifiers (cookies), but also the personalization of customer experience.

Initiative 2: Develop strategies to enhance customer experience

The core insight from this initiative is that you must pinpoint and add value to what really matters to customers. According to Gartner, only brands that provide tangible value to consumers can hope to maintain a competitive advantage (Gartner: Chief Marketing Officer Leadership Vision 2023, 3 Strategic Actions for Success). This concept translates into an ability to generate value during every customer interaction (throughout the customer journey). Combining a hybrid engagement strategy (on- and offline) with a marketing strategy is one recipe for success. Modern marketing is characterized by a complementary relationship between marketing campaigns, customer experience and insights obtained from consumers.

 Initiative 3: Obtain and store explicit consent from your customers

Giving users the possibility of controlling their data has become a prerequisite for any brand that wants to build a trust-based relationship with its clientele. Modern marketing needs to be designed and organized around consent management. It’s essential to understand the laws in effect in the different markets in which your company operates. Organizations need to ensure they establish procedures and technologies (consent management platform or CMP) to continue to respect the array of legislation in effect. In Quebec, Law 25 will strengthen privacy protection legislation for residents starting in September 2023.

 Initiative 4: Modernize your marketing performance measurement tools

The loss of non-persistent identifiers (cookies) makes digital performance measurement more complex. Traditionally, it was determined by multi-touch attribution. Platforms like Facebook and Google offered performance results based on this method. The technology underlying this type of report was based on non-persistent identifiers (cookies). The disappearance of cookies therefore obliges marketers to adopt other tools to measure performance. In particular, marketing mix modelling (MMM), regression-based attribution (RBA) and advanced conversion (Google Enhanced Conversions, Meta Conversions API) are increasingly becoming part of the marketing tool box.

This brief summary gives you an idea of the main initiatives you need to integrate into your marketing program in the coming months to adapt to the latest changes. Adviso can help you with each initiative—get in touch with us!