Impact Of Cookie-Less Future On Marketing

Cookies Are Not A Favorite Anymore! – Impact Of Cookie-Less Future On Marketing

As the cookie-less future approaches, there will be a definitive shift in marketing strategies and customer data collation.  With GDPR and other privacy laws becoming increasingly tighter regarding user privacy concerns, many big technology brands have already faced compliances and penalties heat. Leaders like Google and Apple have had to modify marketing strategies to ensure compliance, even after being fined heavily. The conventional cookie-based approach to personalized advertising can no longer work with the new privacy laws.

To adapt to this change and succeed through it, advertisers have to meet new customer expectations and follow regulatory constraints. Knowing that customer data collation will not be done through third-party cookies anymore, will drive companies to innovate on newer ways to connect with their customer community.

What are the new forms of customer connection in absence of cookies?

After the demise of third-party cookies, there will be two key ways brands can connect with their customers: first-party relationships and cohort-based marketing.

Cohort-based Marketing –

This approach was pioneered by Google and ad tech companies and was based on focused communication to a set of people having similar interests and intent, instead of focusing on a single user. Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is one example of this trend. But, this technology came to an end in January 2022 because of some continuing customer privacy concerns. As a consequence, the company chose a new direction called “Google Topics” (a.k.a. Topics API).

The Topics API aims to create a privacy-focused, interest-based advertising model. Topics are decided on the frequently visited sites of a user and those sites are categorized. Based on these, a user is shown similar recommendations. The Topics API is still getting mixed reviews due to the lack of suggestion accuracy. This accuracy level will take some more time till the categories increase.

First-party Relationships –

This approach is also known as First-person Cookie. A first-person cookie is direct and doesn’t depend on third-party cookie data from others. Take an example where a customer lands on the web page and accepts mail subscriptions or browser notifications. Then the company can target the prospect with relevant ads, for example, upcoming seasonal sales or discounts. In essence, personalization becomes much more effortless with first-party cookies providing the data of what a customer prefers.

How to thrive without third-party or traditional cookies –

Creating a proper marketing strategy with a monthly plan helps in effective execution. Using the below-mentioned methods can help win the marketing game sans third-party cookies –

  • Incorporating Advanced Email Marketing Analytics 

Optimizing email marketing will always remain one of the top ways to get higher returns. Email marketingsoftware that supports A/B testing on links, subject lines, and other elements is crucial. It helps to check which of these options performs better. This approach allows individual user tracking with the help of email. The brand needs to also know if a subscriber has engaged with the sales team, or taken any action on the invite or Call to Action.

  • Harnessing the Power of Push Notifications

No doubt, email marketing has exceptional ROI but it is not the only digital option available for personal interaction. Push notifications hold the potential to urge a prospect to become a customer, perhaps with repeat purchases over a period of time. Research by Airship in 2021 mentioned that opt-in rates for mobile app push notifications range from 29% to a whopping more than 70%!

The focus needs to be on creating engaging content and online/offline networking events to gain high opt-in rates, and enable further conversations by the quality of content and relevance of the Call to Action. Prospects willingly opt in to know about services and products if they like the content and experiences received.

  • Making Privacy Policy Review Crucial

Customers’ expectations about privacy policy and data protection are constantly rising. As third-party cookies are going to become a thing of the past, privacy policies need to meet the conditions of new laws. There are multiple layers to revising privacy policies for the post-cookie era, which must be carefully addressed.

The privacy policy needs to be reviewed regularly, to ensure it mirrors the customer data currently collected. Anything updated over a year ago is out of date and needs revision. Consider the scenario where building an exhaustive customer profile using a customer data platform, will demand an update to the privacy policy as there will be changes in the ways of using the customer’s data.

Next, scrutinizing the security systems will be essential even if a company has robust systems. This will safeguard highly sensitive data like financial data or personal information.

The future demands adopting new ways of personalized marketing

“Cookies were considered to be powerful because they opened the gates of personalization for digital marketers. As we bid adieu to third-party cookies as a prominent strategy, how one can achieve data-driven personalization?”

The answer lies in a resilient, practical content strategy that sits on an agile and reliable customer data platform. As brands learn to survive with new strategies in place of third-party cookies, marketing teams need to learn to improvise, adapt, and survive in the cookie-less future and still drive the necessary results.

AI Trends To Be Aware Of In 2023

Is AI Close To Taking Over Enterprise? – AI Trends To Be Aware Of In 2023

Artificial Intelligence is becoming an integral component of many innovation processes and tools because it helps people as well as businesses to enhance their productivity, decrease costs, and raise efficiency. With AI, enterprises can do things that they never thought were possible, though, the concern of whether AI bots will completely replace the human workforce, still hangs in the balance. So, it is relevant that AI tools are being designed in a manner that helps businesses add value to a job, and frees up precious human skills for better roles.

Here are some upcoming AI trends and their potential impact on businesses around the globe.

AI Trends to Know About in 2023

  • AI’s child – Metaverse

The social media giant, Facebook has already built its Metaverse where people can interact with each other in both professional and entertaining ways. AI, having played a key role in this development will pave the way for cases where machines and humans collaborate to achieve targets in the digital world.

  • Enhanced Language Modeling

Natural Language Processing (NLP) uses model-based techniques, broadly used for Machine Learning and Natural Language generation.  People are aware of speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion, with the use of various voice assistants available but there will be further advancements in these features along with Q & A platforms, forums, handwritten character recognition, and regional language recognition.

  • Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)

There are numerous cyclical or repetitive processes that every organization has to follow, for developing products or services. This is where automation comes into the picture for processes like producing, testing, scanning, and re-building. Till now AutoML has been used for supervised learning applications like classification and regression, but it can also perform unsupervised and reinforcement learning. For example, AutoML can help to analyze the structure and meaning of text data. It can be used to train an ML model to organize text data, pull information, or comprehend the view behind those words.

  • AI’s role in Cybersecurity

IT security teams around the world already have to deal with tons of privacy issues and cyber-attacks, due to the growing use of artificial intelligence and even though it sounds bad, these issues are going to keep growing. The threat is data poisoning where cyber criminals can manipulate the information to train machines and it can be untraceable, which can get through AI-powered defenses.

Also, with the increasing number of internet-connected devices, the vulnerability multiplies too. But, the good news is that if risks are increasing, so are the solutions. Even if the complexity of devices is increasing, so is the ability of AI to detect hostile network bugs with the help of information on attack trends in the database. AI is becoming more capable to protect the systems, which is going to prove beneficial in the long run.

  • Low code or No-code AI

There is a global shortage of AI skills, and this shortage is going to continue for a while as per market reports. But, with the growth of low-code or no-code web and app development technologies, the gap can be filled easily. By 2023, deeper research will deliver no-code or low-code AI systems. This will come with the ability to build user-friendly interfaces for intelligent programs, with the help of a code library having pre-designed modules for common functionalities.

  • Creative uses with AI

AI can now create music, art, poetry, video games, and dramas, albeit of basic nature, but when new AI models expand their horizons of possibilities, a more complex and ‘natural-looking’ output can be expected. There might be more than the use cases seen now, extending to creating logos, templates, basic videos, generating headlines for news and blogs, playing a basic keyboard piece, etc. These are just the promises of actual AI usage not the full-fledged use cases. Currently, the functions and possibilities of AI are rapidly changing. Added to the fact that computational techniques are evolving to show how they are getting closer to an as yet undefined concept of “actual” intellect or psyche. It will reveal more when we can define it in concrete.

The future, definitely, is both terrifying and exciting at the same time.

Final take –

It is easy to predict that the AI industry will show promising results with these trends. AI has the potential to transform the perception of everything around the globe, the interaction people have with each other, and the revolution in businesses by facilitating human efforts. The rise of autonomous vehicles, upgraded sensors for predictive examination in production, and robotics can be seen globally. Since the beginning of AI usage, it has come a long way and soon enough we may be on the brink of experiencing true artificial intelligence with natural outputs!

The Physics of Future-ready B2B Content

The Physics of Future-ready B2B Content

The term ‘physics’ may feel like a misfit here, but a few of its core attributes are being used as metaphors in the world of B2B content. With increasing audiences’ expectations for B2C-like experiences in the B2B world and advances in AI, analytics, and automation, the way we think about Content will change in the coming years.

So, here are the Physics metaphors that apply to the Content.

  • Schrödinger’s Cat Experiment – Is the Content Pursued by Target Audience?

In Erwin Schrödinger’s famous experiment, a cat is put in the box and, after undergoing certain life-threatening situations, is considered alive until the package is unlocked and the cat is observed. This experiment concludes that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and seal it, you would not know if the cat is dead or alive until you open the box so that until the box was opened the cat was (in a sense) both “dead and alive.”

Relating this with Content means the engagement either occurred or did not, but it can be sure only when seen by the right audience. The future demands dynamic content experiences instead of predefined ones to meet the real-time needs of the audience.

So, in terms of this experiment, the B2B content will need to achieve a quantum state where it exists as a ‘wave’ and becomes a ‘particle’ (content experience) only when acknowledged by the ‘observer’ (audience).

  •  Information is the Building Block of Reality / the Conundrum of Content and Data

In recent decades, scientists have mentioned that reality is based on information. This theory is another metaphor when looking at the future of B2B content. In the digital world, Content (knowledge) is the foundation of reality. When observed deeply, the Content acts as data and also creates data. This metadata helps build refined customer experience data models to know what consumers need, want, and do at various touchpoints during the buying lifecycle.

The Content provides so much fuel that organizations cannot optimize the customer experience without it. It becomes obligatory to improve content data and the ways to analyze it significantly.

  • The Multiverse of Content

Quantum mechanics suggests that multiple parallel worlds exist in the exact dimensions of space and time. This concept is known as multiverse and is already very popular in the digital world. This is an intriguing analogy for discussing the future of B2B content activation (using Content to enlighten prospective clients during the sales process to move them down the sales funnel).

To execute the strategy of “right content at the right place and right time,” B2B marketers must go ahead according to the audiences’ needs and their interactions with the Content. As the buyer journey is never linear, there are diverse ways to achieve optimized engagement. Content produced must be backed by skills, technology, and processes that assure it’s interconnected, discoverable, actionable, and adaptive to foster the notion of ‘multiverse’ and become future-ready.

How Far are Organizations/Marketers from becoming Future-Ready?

The path is indeed long.

According to Forrester’s 2022 State of B2B Content Survey –

  • Only 18% of B2B marketers have a universal allocation within marketing
  •   Only 4.5% have a universal allocation across sales, marketing, and product functions
  •   Only 1.5% report having an enterprise-wide universal allocation
  •   29% report that they still do not have any tracking method of content attribution!

If organizations want to be future-ready, they must increase their metadata and classification/allocation ability to promote effective personalization, offer delicate data plus insights to optimize customer experience, and train AI machines for precise, independent decision-making.

Final Take –

To create dynamic content experiences, B2B organizations must extend their content engine levels immensely. Organizations should boost content refinement operations and technology ecosystems to fulfill the promise of real-time personalization.

B2B organizations also need to heighten the role of Content and make it a top priority when transforming digitally. The goal should be to build a future-ready content engine to deliver measurable, relevant content experiences across the touchpoints of the customer buyer journey with the help of evolving technologies and adapt to the upcoming, rapidly emerging content expectations.

Also Read:-How Effective Content Marketing Strengthens B2B Marketing Strategies

Using Mindfulness to Establish Brand Awareness

Using Mindfulness to Establish Brand Awareness

How would it be, if we marketers could just speak straight to a customer’s mind, and cut across all the noise in the highly competitive market?

Just one look, and everyone in the market knows exactly what we offer, and the benefits they can drive from our products.

Some may argue that that’s exactly what B2B advertising does. But this kind of instant brand awareness goes much beyond advertising. The objective is to be present in indirect ways, at unexpected spaces- like a conversation over coffee, like a casual remark at a pub, or just a small observation in a shopping mall- everyone seems to be wearing black nowadays!

Of course, it works slightly differently for B2B brand awareness, takes a little more effort to plant the information bytes, takes a little deeper research to know where!

Psychologists have established that much of our decisions are made in the subconscious mind, through an ‘always-on’  communication stream- much like the mobile devices that are constantly broadcasting and absorbing information – without anyone realizing it! The result of this is that even when there are targeted messages, the decisions are taken on the base of subconscious data collected. So with this continuous absorption of brands’ information, the real crux comes when there is a need to decide for a solution or product. Then all these background data points come into the picture.

Interesting, right?

In this situation, the smart place for brands to stay is in the ‘grey’ zone where the consumers are still undecided, fuzzy between brands, unsure about their differentiators. This is where the siren song of an earlier psychological impact can come into play. It could be anything – something heard somewhere before, something seen they can’t remember where! That’s brand identity- and then the field is open for a great after sales service, a great brand support, a perfect UX etc.

Megan Sangha, Senior Product Marketing Manager, for workflow management company Wrike, in her talk at a recent MarTech conference has an interesting observation. She observes that psychology can be used for cementing a purchase decision through six bias categories:

  • Category heuristics. A picture memory- with a small description of the product, seen even for a very short period of time.
  • Scarcity bias.  The message that it has limited availability- in modern terms- FOMO.
  • Social norms.  Customer reviews, she says, influence 95% of buying decisions.
  • Authority bias. The opinion of an influencer (which is why digital media and social media pay them so handsomely), or an expert, even an impactful research data.
  • The power of free. Freebies! They always, as she says, ‘sweeten the deal’.
  • The power of now. An opportunity missed is lost forever, unavailability of a product lowers its value, and leads to likely discarding it.

These small insights can lead to higher customer satisfaction, lower customer turnover, churn, improve sales process, and of course, better reviews from earlier customers.

Add these tricks to your basket of strategies- mind games never lose!

Content Marketing Strategy

How Effective Content Marketing Strengthens B2B Marketing Strategies

Content marketing in recent years has become one of the most effective modes of marketing. Implementing a good content strategy is at the epicenter of a good marketing plan.

A good content strategy has a proven track record of generating traffic which over time has resulted in lead generation. Businesses today employ the power of content to engage with their target audience. Content’s primary role is to enable decision-makers to make informed purchase decisions with respect to enterprise solutions.

Businesses today focus more on a problem statement before investing in any technology or enterprise solution. Hence, it is of utmost importance for decision-makers to know how a solution could help them streamline things. And solution providers deploy various types of content, namely case studies, white papers, etc. to illustrate how their solution has helped businesses address their concerns.

Content’s role in lead generation

Content marketing can prove to be an effective tool to generate leads for businesses. Businesses can curate high-quality content in the form of a white paper, or a case study as a part of their overall campaign strategy.

Content Marketing’s role in organic growth

Content marketing is crucial for a good SEO Strategy. Search engines today give preference to high-quality content and it plays an important role in SERP. SEO strategies must focus on the use of content; and the creation of content should be consistent to gain results.

Content marketing might seem cost-centric to businesses in the beginning. However, over time, it has been proven to be more effective than paid campaigns, and other inorganic forms of marketing.

Planning a content marketing strategy

Content marketing whilst it may seem easy to do, it involves several complexities. A good content strategy employs different modes of communication so that it is propagated to the right target audience. A plan that is inclusive of email marketing like sending newsletters to your subscribers, and sharing content on social media to increase its reach. Engaging with other similar content, etc.

Marketers today include content as a key ingredient in their overall marketing plan. Providing key decision-makers with the right information is of primary focus for businesses and the best way to do that is by having a great content marketing strategy.