As digital ad spend continues to grow, digital marketers face an increasingly saturated landscape. It’s not enough to shout loud, marketers need to target their audience in a more granular way.
Combine this with concerns around cookie deprecation and increasingly strict privacy laws, and it’s clear that 2022 will see businesses depend much more heavily on zero and first-party data.
So what does that mean for your marketing department? Ultimately, it means that your content has to work harder to earn trust, and build lasting relationships with new and existing customers.
Marketers’ strategic priorities are shifting as consumers demand tailored content and transparent value propositions in return for access to valuable first-party data. Adverity’s latest research report, based on a survey of 964 marketers and analysts from across the world reveals what strategic priorities are at the top of the to-do list for 2022.
Strategic priority: Getting personal
So marketers need to cut through the noise to build relationships with customers. How are they planning to do it? With personalized content.
In fact, a whopping 66% of marketing and data professionals highlight personalized content as a key strategic priority for 2022.
“Too many businesses are relying on either outdated data models, or are rushing in with a one size fits all approach and expecting immediate results.
Christina Schlesinger, Chief Customer Officer at Adverity
“Attracting new customers is paramount to any business that wants to grow and scale. However, before you can grow your customer base, it is important to understand the customers that you already have.” Says Christina Schlesinger, Chief Customer Officer at Adverity.
“Too many businesses are relying on either outdated data models, or are rushing in with a one size fits all approach and expecting immediate results. Whilst growing audiences is a number one priority for any marketer, it starts at home first. Learn, test, hypothesize using existing data and then utilize these insights to truly grow at scale.”
Strategic priority: Audience building and targeting
It wouldn’t be a marketing blog if we didn’t at some point mention the holy trinity: in the name of the right content, in front of the right people at the right time. There’s no point pouring time and effort into personalizing content if you can’t get that content in front of the right people, at the right time. But of course, you know that, along with the rest of the marketers and analysts who put audience building and targeting at the top of their to-do list. 65% say this is a key strategic focus for 2022.
How it’s going
Despite focused efforts, less than half of respondents considered their organization’s current capability for delivering personalized content as strong, with 2 out of 5 believing it only to be 'OK' and 12% identifying it as an area that required significant improvement.
Likewise, only 40% of respondents felt their audience building and targeting capability is strong with 16% identifying it as an area that required significant improvement. So what can businesses do to accelerate their efforts?
Strategy conundrum: Campaign reporting is high reward, but low priority
Although campaign reporting is ranked the lowest strategic priority for both marketing data analysts and marketers, respondents who said that they are very strong at campaign reporting are three times more likely to also be strong in personalized content delivery and audience building.
“Currently businesses are facing a paradox between being large global entities with customer data all around the world and meeting the demand for very localized and personalized campaigns.” Said Harriet Durnford Smith, CMO at Adverity explains, “This poses a significant challenge when determining marketing strategy and allocating the appropriate budgets.”
“For marketers to deliver a global marketing strategy that is hyper-personalized, they need to be fully on top of their data. They need a single source of truth that is quickly and easily understood. Otherwise, they simply won’t have the time or resources to react to customer demands, and competitors who are more analytically mature will beat them to the punch.”
“Currently businesses are facing a paradox between being large global entities with customer data all around the world and meeting the demand for very localized and personalized campaigns.”
Harriet Durnford Smith, CMO at Adverity
Building and targeting an audience takes time. But with third-party cookies dead in the water, it’s important that marketing takes that time to make sure their campaign reporting is up to scratch so they can get the best of their data. Otherwise, as businesses try to become more personalized with their marketing, they’re only going to end up creating more silos and wasting even more time wrangling data.
Check out the full report here for insights from 964 marketers and data analysts.
