The marketing environment is chaotic. It is challenging to stand out while using traditional social, email, and display marketing channels because of their decrease. It’s challenging to remain ahead of customers’ shifting engagement choices. How do you offer something unique that will pique a customer’s interest and encourage them to interact with you and make a purchase?
Over 30 million chats were observed at Spectrm. Despite the fact that we already know this, we nevertheless wanted to find out more about the current accomplishments and challenges faced by marketers. In a study of 400 B2C marketers for our State of B2C Conversational Marketing research, we discovered that marketers are finding new channels successful while traditional channels are failing due to oversaturation, privacy laws, and shifting customer behavior.
Declining channels and privacy challenges call for new approaches.
Many people are no longer succeeding in the same ways they did in the past. These days, it’s challenging to stand out in crowded inboxes and active news feeds, and marketers are feeling the strain. People are observing a reduction in their use of digital marketing platforms, with social media showing the greatest decline. Influencer marketing, email marketing, and SMS marketing are some more prominent channels that are declining.
Not only is it difficult to capture an audience’s attention across numerous mediums. The current growth in laws like GDPR and CCPA, operating system privacy improvements like iOS 14, and third-party cookie-blocking browsers is a result of customers’ growing worries about data collecting and privacy. All of these factors restrict the quantity and variety of client information that may be gathered. According to six out of ten marketers, these regulations are making their marketing strategies less effective and requiring them to come up with new approaches to understand their target audience.
Overall, because of these dwindling channels and limitations on data collecting, marketers today are having a harder time attracting and converting new customers. It is often difficult to determine whether efforts are truly succeeding due to attribution problems. According to marketers, it’s getting harder to keep clients who have already purchased from you and to increase your sales from them.
Customers are becoming more difficult to engage as they read through crowded news feeds and posts. The use of these media by marketers is not discouraged, however. To maximize their value, they merely need to devise fresh methods.
Continue business as usual.
In order to boost client engagement, one strategy is to carry on with regular operations while making adjustments and modifications to your current methods. This involves ongoing social media, search, email, and display advertising efforts for website traffic. To make it easier for clients to find what they need, invest engineering resources in improving mobile website experiences. To lessen the impact of data constraints on tracking and attribution, implement first-party cookies and provide server-side tagging solutions.
Consider new approaches.
44% of the daily time spent on mobile devices is spent on social media or messaging apps. Why not engage in dialogue with customers since they are always using their phones to research new brands and talk to their loved ones? Another strategy that marketers should take into account while searching for novel ways to communicate with clients is conversational marketing.
Through the messaging capabilities of the apps they use every day, engage them in a conversation and ask them questions to assist direct them to the goods or services they need. Since this method gathers data directly from your customers, it addresses growing data restrictions and privacy issues. By gathering the data they give you, you may not only better understand your customers but also personalize future offers for them and educate your AI for more natural interactions.
Start by identifying your use cases, such as lead generation or commerce, before shifting to a strategy like this. Then, decide which communications channels are best for your use cases and audience, and pinpoint each channel’s appropriate entry point. Create a chatbot with personality next, and employ conversational AI to make sure it keeps picking up new skills as it communicates with your audience. Finally, as you grow to new channels and markets, keep refining and improving your conversational funnel and AI.
Invest in personalization.
Finally, because customers are looking for personalized experiences with brands today, another approach is to invest in website personalization tools and alternative data sources to better identify users and serve them personalized experiences. Marketers can leverage post-purchase surveys to find out how people learn about your brand as well, and you can build your attribution reporting from this type of direct feedback.
Putting It All Together
For marketers today, the challenges out there are many: declining channels, increased data regulations, changing customer preferences and more. But the opportunity to overcome those challenges is out there, too.
Marketers seeking for fresh ideas for client engagement could go to the places where their target audience hangs out and use daily tools like messaging applications. Instead of just flooding the internet with customized adverts, marketers must consider how to personalize their services to their customers. When deciding which channels to employ to interact with clients, take privacy into account as well. In general, consider new methods of connecting with your clients if the old ones are no longer successful.
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by Max Koziolek
source: Forbes.com