Every marketer will agree that the COVID-19 crisis has served as a wake-up call for brands and enterprises in 2020. Marketers had to shift their focus overnight to two major areas – marketing technology and digital platforms as remote work and social distancing emerged as strong warriors against the virus.
Automation is one of the key technologies that organizations use to generate sales and brand loyalty in today’s marketing. Marketers can leverage automation to create configurable, multi-channel campaigns that engage customers based on rich audience analytics. It enables marketers to shift their focus away from monotonous, manual processes and on to more strategic, creative tasks.
Businesses must evaluate their MarTech in 2021 and ensure that it allows them to keep up with evolving cultural values and norms. While automation can help them become more agile, it isn’t enough to account for the full impact that shifting customer preferences might have on a marketing campaign or brand.
Marketers should prioritize customer experience above specific technological features. A MarTech stack deployed in 2021 or beyond should be able to achieve the following:
- Businesses should put consumer privacy and data ethics at the center of everything they do
- Enable marketers to truly personalize their communications
- Empower brands to launch campaigns and see a return on their investment
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Privacy and data ethics should be prioritized
The two crucial forces affecting the marketing environment today are privacy and data ethics. When it comes to storing and using consumer data, brands are starting to realize that simply checking a box isn’t enough.
This is because consumers today want to be more informed. They want to know what information is being collected about them, how it is utilized, and with whom it is shared. This level of transparency and control is increasingly becoming the cornerstone of how brands can earn consumer trust and, ultimately, loyalty.
Advanced privacy and security features in MarTech will gain traction in 2021. Marketing can be customized as per what each customer allows and expects by giving businesses the ability to uncover each individual’s set of preferences, what information they want, what information they don’t, what types of communications they have opted into, what messages resonate, and what their paths to purchase look like. Customers will feel more at ease with the brand if they have more power and transparency, and they will be more inclined to become loyalists.
Consumer-driven personalization
The majority of marketing nowadays is done from the perspective of marketers rather than consumers. Businesses want to locate prospects, create stunning content, and present it to them in order to generate income. Essentially, businesses consider the consumer to be a recipient of their messages. However, as customers become increasingly active in how brands use and share their data, businesses should consider the customer to be a participant.
Every day, consumers provide marketers with vast volumes of data, allowing businesses to make more informed, customized decisions. Marketers can provide a piece of collateral that satisfies each criterion by deploying technology that can determine which channels are favored, what each person’s privacy preferences are, and what their purchase history or previous actions have been. Rather than creating marketing materials that communicate the message that businesses believe are important, they are listening to customers and using data to design a message that will resonate.
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Consumer preferences and tech capabilities should be in sync
Marketers may need to reassess their tech stacks in 2021, as rising requests for privacy and personalization drive marketing. There needs to be a very healthy coordination between the customization needs of a brand and the technology stack deployed to deliver this job. There should not be too much of a struggle to ensure the two have a seamless coordination.
The capability to deploy personalized campaigns swiftly and securely using data will distinguish successful brands from those that struggle to attract and keep customers. As long as marketers stop thinking about what they want to say and start listening to what customers want to hear, automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning will continue to play a vital part in achieving this.
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