The marketing industry is changing at a breakneck pace. While marketing teams are no strangers to adapting to change, the upheavals brought on by the pandemic are shattering traditional models and driving the need for adaptability and flexibility into overdrive.
Today’s marketing teams have shifted their strategies and taken customer expectations into account on a deeper level. The one constant that has emerged from the recent upheavals is that the future of marketing is flexible and businesses that embrace that approach will be successful.
So, how can a marketer go about doing this? What is causing this shift, and how can agile teams adjust to meet the demands of the flexible marketing future?
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Flexible future of marketing
In today’s world, many businesses operate in silos. The marketing team generally works independently from other teams like operations, product development and IT under the traditional working model. Even inside marketing departments, there are sometimes significant silos. These barriers generate inefficiencies, particularly when it comes to data sharing inside the organization, and the pandemic has further highlighted these inefficiencies.
The flexible future of marketing aims to dismantle these barriers and encourage companies to think holistically. Teams are quickly adapting to meet the demands of the flexible future by refocusing their internal strategies to align their objectives and break down silos.
Privacy and data
Privacy and data are front and centre in the new society. The industry is changing as a result of recent privacy rules and ongoing industry discussions about the deprecation of third-party cookies. With the extinction of identifiers, brands must rely increasingly on their own data, and marketing teams must stretch their creative muscles to find new ways to use that data to their advantage. The problem remains: organizations must continue to push the envelope in order to develop smarter ways to collect and exploit their own data in order to ensure customer retention and growth.
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Unifying processes and workflows across organizational silos is critical to achieving success with data collection and sharing within a company. Now is the time to learn how to pivot strategy in order to begin gathering and employing more owned data, as well as to continuously evaluate these new measures to ensure their effectiveness.
Preparing for the new future
Companies should be open and transparent with their customers and audiences about how they gather and use first-party data. They should feel as if they are a participant in the discussion. Both in strategy and in customer policy, transparency is essential.
All of the strategies that have been implemented should be fully compliant with the evolving regulations. This is a difficult task, but it is necessary. Including data collection processes in privacy policies, giving customers tools to regulate their data sharing with the company, and giving them explicit opt-in/opt-out alternatives are all good places to start.
The pandemic shook the marketing industry to its core. Consumer attitudes and purchasing habits are shifting on a dime. Gone are the days when marketers could stick to a fixed annual strategy and pivot every quarter or so. Marketers need to be adaptable and continue to push themselves to evolve in order to address the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Marketing in a cookie less world
These silos were developed in the world of third-party cookies. In terms of agility, compliance, and transparency, long-standing systems and working methods are quickly becoming bottlenecks for teams. But how will a world without cookies affect marketing?
Although it is evident that first-party data gathering and utilization is the way of the future, it is being scrutinized on many levels in terms of privacy and compliance. The reign of first-party cookies will force teams to break free from existing silos and move forward with agility, embracing the flexible future of marketing as a means to success.
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