THE HIGHLIGHTS
How brands are driving loyalty through technology
To keep pace with consumers and turn them into loyal customers as post-pandemic behaviours bed in, marketers need a full view of all their interactions with a brand.
recommended READING
FULL
SCREEN
FULL
SCREEN
There have been profound shifts in post-pandemic consumer mindsets and behaviours - increased online purchasing, more ethical and responsible consumption, and greater selectivity in how companies can use personal data, to name a few.
As the audience at the Festival of Marketing heard, brands can stay connected with these ongoing changes - and adapt to them effectively - by closely mapping customers’ lifecycles and unifying the data they hold about them.
Sponsored by tealium
BACK TO top
BACK TO HUB
watch ‘Time to market marketing: How to increase your influence’ at the Festival of Marketing on demand
Find out more about how marketers can take a bigger role in leading their businesses. Watch Salesforce’s session, ‘Time to market marketing: How to increase your influence’, at the Festival of Marketing on demand now.
Thanks to the growing restrictions on tracking tools such as third-party cookies, marketers are facing a “data deprecation”, said David Morris, vice-president of global solutions consulting at customer data platform Tealium. In this climate, they are grappling with how to continue offering value to consumers.
“What we used to have available… to understand what our consumers are looking for is no longer [an option]. And so that deprecation of both the availability, but also the accuracy of data is something that's impacting our decisions, but also impacting our strategy for how we move forward,” he said.
Morris then posed the question of how marketers plan to engage in a post-pandemic era: “If our customers never come into our stores, how are we going to engage with them long-term? Brand loyalty is definitely up for grabs for the next six to nine months minimum, as people start to adjust how they buy, and move on as consumers. We have to remind ourselves that whilst people might be consuming digital first, the reality is that the impact of human connection still has a massively positive experience for those who are communicating with our brands.”
To convert data conversations into real conversations, brands must make use of what customers are already sharing with them through all their interactions, Morris continued. “The landscape we're in now requires us to be thoughtful about how we achieve that. Yet we now have a burden of choice when it comes to technology,” he said.
“It's not so much now about ‘is it going to fit with my internal processes?’ but ‘how is it going to help me maintain my flexibility long term, to correctly support my marketing and business initiatives with my customers?’.
“After all, customers are expecting [brands] to remember and know all the communication [they've] had in the past. They expect [us] to know what their likes and dislikes are. They expect [us] to be able to engage and react when they switch channels. And all of this, very often, with a budget that doesn't increase, even though the ways in which our consumers talk to us does, and the ways in which our consumers expect us to react has changed.”
“Our job is to find the stories that connect with audiences and engage customers.”
Emily Latham, Channel 4
Actionable insights
Having a solid understanding of the customer lifecycle, and a strategy for harnessing and acting on the data shared within it, is more important than ever, said Ulisse Sarmiento, Tealium’s EMEA regional vice president for solutions consulting.
In a separate Festival of Marketing session, Sarmiento outlined the five key stages of the customer life cycle that marketers need to respond to.
Click here to watch the session on demand at the Festival of Marketing
Tealium's Ulisse Sarmiento on unifying data across channels
“First of all, it's about awareness. The customer becomes aware of a company and visits a website. It helps to understand what the customer is doing, the first moment they hit a website, so you can start building on that awareness.
“Then second is the consideration that the client has for your company. They consider and evaluate what their purchase could be.
“The next step is purchase. And then it’s time to think about retention - and if the customer only purchased once, you need to start nurturing.
“And finally, what you need to do to get this customer coming back is re-engagement and advocacy, making the customer interested in new products or services, or repurchasing products. So this is the customer lifecycle,” Sarmiento explained.
Data can be more easily be processed into actionable insights within an end-to-end technology platform that covers data collection and insight generation, and which can integrate seamlessly with any other marketing technology, Sarmiento summed up, giving marketers a clearer way forward for 2022. ■
Click here to watch the session on demand at the Festival of Marketing