Let me ask you a controversial question: Is it time for you to rethink the buyer’s journey for your business? I know that for many companies buyer’s journeys represent a relatively new approach, but some recent shifts in the marketplace suggest there might be a better way.
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If a moat is an uncrossable chasm, then data may not be a moat. No amount of data can make it impossible for the competition to catch up. But it could be an inconvenience to the competition who is trying to climb your walls.
Content marketing is informative, entertaining, and helpful. But great ideas for content aren’t enough. Who decides they are “great”? The customer decides. How do we know the decision of the customer? Data–the more the better.
As content marketing has been practiced today, it resembles custom publishing. Companies tell stories that romanticize their brand, distributing those stories through various channels and amplifying them through social media. Content marketing has come to be more akin to advertising.
This past year, the demand for personalization is at an all-time high.
According to a 2019 Lytics white paper, two-thirds of customers want brands to adjust content based on their real-time context. Over 40% are annoyed if you don’t. And another two-thirds of those said they skip making a purchase out of annoyance. Successful B2C personalization has become the expectation.
That’s not just a problem for retail.
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Personalization: why do it? No, this isn’t a suggestion that you shouldn’t. It’s just important to think about why you are doing it in the first place. Personalization needs to benefit the customer experience and drive your business.
Digital transformation is all around us–no company can escape. Most companies recognize this, and focus on managing the change in an effective way. But then there are others that think they can avoid digital.
The biggest mistake that many companies make in their B2B sales and marketing activities is the way they fragment or silo different touchpoints in the customer journey among disparate functional teams. And, worse, the way they make it difficult for those teams to work together. Customer experience matters for B2B marketers. You’d think you would make that easier to bring to life.
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It’s time for marketers to put humanity back in their marketing practices. Today for SearchChat, Steve Zakur and I discuss first whether you should be worried about government regulation. It seems some marketers have their head in the sand that it will never be an issue, others have their “paranoid” dial turned up to 13. People who have been giving away their data for free are tired of being abused. There’s an unease and distrust around privacy because that trust has been repeatedly violated. Is it the end of data-driven marketing, or does marketing need to get smarter?
In my work at SoloSegment and with individual clients, I spend tons of time working at the intersections of marketing, artificial intelligence, data, and privacy. I suspect the same is true for you too. Of course, that means we all spend lots of time working with — and worrying about — the role played by Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and especially given their recent missteps with regard to data and privacy, Facebook. Which is why Mark Zuckerberg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post proved so fascinating. Zuckerberg talked about Facebook’s challenges, and to address these asked for government regulation in a number of areas: