Today, customers want a lot. They want personalization. They want brands to know about them. And they want to have two-way interactions with those brands in order to build relationships.
Successful marketing in 2024 starts with keeping up and responding to the latest marketing trends. But what are these trends?
In our podcast, the One to One Consumer Marketing Podcast, we talk to marketing leaders each week, and here are some tactical advice from Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar, Chime’s Natalie Miles and the Houston Texan’s Doug Vosik.
#1 Don't just take traditional approaches to marketing — question whether they're providing value in today's world.
There are a lot of traditional principles we practice as marketers. But are they relevant for today’s customers with today’s technology? It may be time to rethink and reimagine our approach to marketing.
“A lot of principles that we are talking about today are all wrong. They need to be totally reinvented and reimagined.
“That’s why I started writing the book and taking areas, starting from consumer insights about distribution, pricing, advertising, sponsorships, experiences, loyalty programs, every single aspect of the marketing ecosystem — whatever the theories and principles and frameworks behind them, they are gone.
“You need to reinvent marketing, reimagine marketing, and that new way of doing marketing is what I call quantum marketing.”
#2 Augmented reality will be the next game-changing marketing technology.
AI is all the rage today. But what new technologies will change the playing field tomorrow? For Raja, augmented reality will be the next frontier of customer engagement.
“Augmented reality adds a complete layer of information to your context. Whether you’re in a physical context or in a digital context, it adds a new dimension to your perception of those areas that is going to be game changing.
Creating omnichannel experiences include in-store and online, too. Are your customers having a consistent brand experience in both? As Shaurya explains, brands who are able to do that will lead their industry.
“The consumer will make sure that they are expecting similar experiences when they are going into a store and when they are coming on to your own website or they are buying from a marketplace. From a marketing perspective, it would be essential for people like us to understand that.
“The future of marketing and retail and consumers would be a mixture of physical and digital. And then whoever is making sure that they’re able to give that consistent experience throughout platforms, in that particular category, that brand would be a winner.”
💡 Tactical advice:
“From loyalty management we graduate to preference management. You need to have perpetual preference management platforms, which means you need to know when the consumer is going to make a choice. You need to be present at the time to influence the consumer’s choice in your favor and you need to actually be able to do things that will give them the nudge to come to you as opposed to go somewhere else. This requires a total rethink of how you run these programs.”
Start prioritizing your customer preference management. Increase and refine your approach to tracking customer behavior and be sure that your marketing actions are in response to that behavior.
#1 There is no personalization at scale if you don't have good data management.
“If you really want to do one-to-one marketing, that does not exist without data activation. … What ends up happening is you end up with these point-to-point integrations that don’t talk to each other and you end up with either different definitions of the same audience because you have marketers trying to recreate that definition or business logic in their own tools instead of sending that same unified audience to all your tools. So you have issues there.
“Or if you change the definition of what a retained user looks like somewhere upstream, that may not make its way into all the different downstream tools because it’s not being captured in a system of record.
“So I would say, without that good data management and data hygiene, best practices and that system of record and data activation, there is no personalization at scale.”
Actionable Takeaways:
Work to make sure that your systems talk to each other, and that your data is consistent across your systems.
Focusing on good data management, hygiene, and best practices will help you scale personalization more easily and more effectively.
#2 Focus on action taken as a result of channel engagement.
“As marketers, we often get hung up on what I think tend to be very superficial channel engagement metrics. And this is where, yes, engagement is a leading indicator into retention, but you have to understand what type of engagement drives retention or not. And as lifecycle or email marketers, we often get very hung up on email open rates and click rates.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if someone opened an email or clicked on it if they aren’t doing that further-down-the-funnel action. And you have to figure out what that is and be able to measure it. Really what that tells you is, are we actually getting the right people to open this email or not? That’s really what you should be measuring.”
Actionable Takeaways:
Focus on actions taken that move customers further down the funnel, not superficial engagement metrics.
Have methods in place to measure the actions taken on your channels and use that data to inform your future efforts.
#3 Personalize customer journeys based on where your leaks are.
“Figure out where in your user journey you really need to focus on. Where do you have a leaky bucket? Is it activation, is it retention? For us, where we started to dial down on personalization was on that onboarding experience, because we realized when we added these additional product offerings, the one-size-fits-all onboarding experience we had just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. We at least had to get to a one-to-many experience based off of what use case or problem someone was coming to Chime for.
“So if someone was coming to us with the use case of ‘I want to improve my credit score,’ that’s a different onboarding lifecycle series you need to serve or tailor to that user member versus a, ‘Hey, come to Chime. We’re fee free checking and overdraft.'”
Actionable Takeaways:
Continue to improve your customer journey by plugging holes where customers may fall off.
Create different customer journeys, especially for onboarding, where one-size-fits-all may fail.
#1 Be aware and flexible enough to tailor your message to keep fans engaged and happy.
As Doug said in our interview, “We don’t control what happens on Sunday.” Yet you need to have a messaging plan whether you win or lose. And you may need to constantly tailor that message to keep fans engaged.
“We are here to capitalize on the good moments and to make the bad moments not as bad. You can see marketers do this in sports. When the team’s bad, you’re going to focus more on experience, connection, human interest, non-sports things. When the team is good, you’re doubling down on why this team is the best team ever and to get excited and to have hope and championships will come.
“We all do it because again, we are magnifying the status or at times manipulating the story to not focus so much on the negatives. It’s fascinating when you look at that emotional buyer that is the core of your revenue on the ticketing side, and how you keep them happy.”
#2 Satisfying each fan's wants is challenging — but you have to try.
Every customer is different. Every sports fan is different. How can you learn more about them to deliver personalized experiences, both online and in person?
“Everybody wants something different to feel satisfied.
“Some want the best tailgate experience pregame in the parking lots. The party. Some want that as the core of their day. Some want perks and discounts. Some want the comfiest, best view in the building from a seat perspective. Some want the sense of community around their seats. The same people have been sitting with me ten years, this is my extended family. Some people want cool merch. They like to feel that team swag, right? Some people like the traditions and rituals and the songs and the chants. So some people are more concerned about traffic and parking.
“The complexity of satisfaction on any fan these days, let alone your core, is more complex than ever. And the best you can do as a marketer is be extremely data driven.”
💡 Tactical advice:
“How do you just accept where fans are and either dial back resources or come up with a new solution? That’s one. Will there come a point in time we’re all willing to look at ourselves and say, these are not important anymore and scale back?
“Two is, you can see, of course, where all the fans are and that’s social. But as you know, we only control our outcomes so much on those platforms. They’re not owned and operated. We can make the best content in the world. We can engage our fans, we can look at all the analytics, but we all know that without rather extensive paid efforts behind them, the organic reach of our posts are extremely limited.”
Examine your channels — are you using the channels where your customers are spending the most time, or are you still relying on “classic” channels and hoping they’ll come to you? It may be time to reevaluate your strategy to set yourself up for the future.
Want more insights on customer retention? Subscribe to The One to One Consumer Marketing Podcast for the full episodes with these amazing guests and more!
