Personalized Marketing Strategy for an Evolving Marketplace

Personalized Marketing Strategy for an Evolving Marketplace

Data-related policies and regulations are quickly reshaping the future of marketing in the digital age, but so are customer behaviors and expectations. While customers are proving quick to abandon experiences that aren’t personalized to their needs and wants, new compliance measures present challenges for a personalized marketing strategy and how organizations can use such data to target customers.

For example, the US Justice Department recently demonstrated oversight into ad targeting and delivery systems, announcing an advertising-related settlement agreement regarding social marketing practices related to segmenting based on sex, race, religion, and other characteristics protected by certain anti-discrimination regulations.

Faced with the risk of falling behind in an ecosystem of evolving data privacy regulations, you need to ensure your competitive advantage by adopting data governance and marketing automation strategies that lean into first-party data to personalize customer-centered experiences with a personalized marketing strategy.

Identify Your First-Party Data Management Strategies

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, which took effect in 2018 and 2020 respectively, were only the first step of an evolving roadmap that governs the way businesses use data to reach their audiences.

To start thinking about what this means for your brand, consider the impact of first-party data across four strategic areas:

  1. Audience behaviors: Site activity, which reveals a lot about audience behaviors and interests, could influence audience building or personalization definition. Is your marketing strategy learning or personalizing experiences based on behaviors?
  2. Assets and content: The metadata strategy associated with your online content could activate personalization. Do you have a strategy in place to match certain content to meet certain behaviors?
  3. Forms: Form strategies enable you to strategically collect data from audiences and build profiles. Are you currently running form strategies that vary and build throughout the user journey of the funnel, or do you have one static form type across all scenarios?
  4. Screens: If you can deliver the right experience based on the device or channel that audiences are using or prefer, you’re more likely to increase engagement. Do you have an omnichannel personalization strategy in place, or are you running strategies across channels in silos?

If it wasn’t on your marketing roadmap already, now is the time to enhance a user-centric personalized marketing strategy that relies more on first-party data, focusing on your behavior-related targeting criteria to attract, engage, and retain the right audiences.

Establish Data Governance

Now that you’ve asked yourself some foundational questions pertaining to first-party data management strategies, you need to address data governance best practice strategies so that your organization can effectively scale personalization and thrive in today’s evolving data-regulated ecosystem.

Your approach to data governance should begin with the following recommendations:

  1. Partner with Legal/Compliance to review your privacy policy and ensure that it clearly defines the data/information collected, how it is collected and how it will be used. Another best practice is to inform customers of their rights and choices.
  2. Implement a data governance model that collects, normalizes, and activates prospect and customer data in meaningful ways.
  3. Build the capability to rely less on second and third-party data enrichment and more on your first-party data, fueled by an interconnected marketing technology stack.
  4. Refine your audience profile, building strategies to consider the full lifecycle journey, where every interaction or transaction is a part of the profiling. This requires you to move away from looking merely at a visit and a purchase and closer at all that happens in between.
  5. Focus on quality over quantity and the strategy around how you move your audience through the funnel. Focus on the use of customer lifetime value (CLV) as a key performance indicator of success over the number of contacts in your database.

Just imagine how much better you could engage with your audiences if you integrated key behaviors from their site activity into your data governance and marketing automation strategies.

Once you’ve tackled laying the foundation for a personalized marketing strategy with your data strategies, you can begin to design customer-centric experiences and drive end-to-end customer lifetime value.

Become a Leader in Personalization

Customers are demanding personalization that’s deeper and more relevant than ever before, but marketing organizations are finding themselves with the challenge of how to manage both privacy and personalization. Advertising practices and platforms, already forced to comply with external regulations, are now coming into scrutiny in the US for their targeting operations and practices.

If you don’t have data governance strategies in place to segment and communicate with audiences in a personalized way, then you could quickly lose out to competitors who do. Now is the time to assess a data-driven personalized marketing strategy that focuses on establishing scalable solutions that can thrive in a cookie-less future. Concentrix is experienced in working with global B2B and B2C brands to enhance marketing strategies that lean into using first-party data and scale marketing efforts in an evolving ecosystem of data privacy regulations.

Contact us to learn more about how Concentrix Catalyst can help you to build data personalization into your personalized marketing strategy to enhance experiences.