Marketing practices continue to change, seemingly at a faster pace every year. For brands to remain customer-centric, competent, and relevant, they must adapt. As 2023 comes to a close, this an ideal time for marketers to reflect on the past, learn from the highs and lows, and strategize for the year ahead. So, to help you do just that, we have compiled our top data-driven marketing predictions.
Let’s look at what will dominate the near future and what strategies we can leave in the past.
The Hot List – What to Include in Your Future Marketing Strategy
Here are the top 4 marketing trends that will guide brands in the coming year. They will help you go beyond what you already offer, integrate lucrative marketing tools enabled by tech, and forge strong connections with customers.
#1 – Hyper-Personalized, AI-Driven Interactions
Industries – from travel to retail to healthcare – are turning to reliable data paired with generative AI technology to deliver more personalized experiences than ever before. For example, AWS partnered with Hyatt recently to help the brand deliver personalized recommendations to travelers and add-on services based on data, like interests. The result? Within six months, the company saw an additional $40 million in revenue.
By tapping into demographics, behaviors, interests, and motivations, brands have the opportunity to tailor nearly every element of the customer journey – images, offers, discounts, touchpoints, and chatbots – to drive real success.
#2 – Category Stretching
Many brands are looking to leverage their footprint and current customer base by expanding into relevant, adjacent product categories. Tabasco recently announced that it’s expanding its hot sauce brand into the drink department with ready-to-drink (RTD) alcoholic beverages. Even Dove is expanding their haircare line to cover your pups as well. So, how can brands make these bets less risky? Data. By using data to better understand their current base, brands can lock in solid positioning and targeting for a successful launch.
#3 – Ethical & Purpose-Driven Marketing
In recent years, many brands have recognized and implemented sustainable business approaches to reflect consumers’ growing concern over environmental protection as well as diversity and equality initiatives (DEI). For this reason, companies like AnalyticsIQ have invested major research and development resources into curating predictive data that unlocks people’s green initiative attitudes and actions, for example. To avoid being viewed as simply greenwashing, brands can use this data in their future marketing strategy to curate specific, organic messages to key segments.
#4 – Audience-Led Targeting
Many high-growth companies and product leaders are familiar with the concept of product-led targeting, which means the value of the product itself is responsible for a majority of the sales process. Well, as per our marketing predictions, 2024 is the year for marketers to adopt an “audience-led” approach. That means, instead of merely focusing on the media’s latest shiny object, from TikTok shops to shoppable CTV ads, simply focus on building a solid data foundation.
Then, utilize those target audiences to tell you where they are spending time, and let them lead you to them! Most likely, brands will find it’s a combination of channels, from social media to direct mail to their inbox.
The Not Hot List: What Won’t Bode Well for Your Brand
Data-driven marketing methods that only look at the tip of the iceberg can only take you so far. So, in the era of hyper-personalization, it’s time to say goodbye to obsolete strategies that are no longer effective.
#1 – Relying Only On Basic Demographics
If you’re a brand trying to paint a marketing masterpiece with only the primary colors of demographics like age and gender, you’re missing the mark. There is a plethora of customer data points available, *cough* 1500+ at AnalyticsIQ, for example *cough*. And that’s just scratching the surface. Many brands also conduct custom research and analytics to build their own proprietary, predictive data.
#2 – One-Size-Fits-All Messaging
Are you blasting the same message to everyone in your target market? With the proliferation of dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technology paired with robust prospect and customer data, there’s really no excuse to show the same creativity and offer to every person.
Taylor West, the global head of sales at Clinch, noted in a recent Digiday interview, “I think a lot of people get intimidated and think it has to be complex, but it can be however you want. Once the infrastructure is there, everything can be done with the click of a button. You can move with the market as it’s changing, and teams can collaborate in a way they couldn’t before. We can tag any element within the creative — the image, copy, background, call-to-action or product — and then tie that to an individual user and feed it back to a brand’s CDP or DMP.”
#3 – Being Channel Myopic
Of course, there are channels and tactics that have performed historically well for most companies. However, continued business growth requires continued marketing growth. It means ensuring your strategy branches out, including more than just one or two channels. With the right data in hand, you can not just set up a solid audience-led targeting approach. It will also better prepare you to measure your data-driven marketing tactics more effectively.
As the famous Peter Drucker quote goes, “you can’t measure what you can’t manage.” Fortunately, marketers understand this deeply, which is why we are seeing a continuous rise in demand for our data for the use of deep cross-channel analytics in data collaboration and data clean room environments, like Snowflake and LiveRamp’s Safe Haven.
#4 – Hitting The ‘Ignore’ Button on Privacy Updates
Ugh! Isn’t marketing supposed to be fun? Yes, privacy discussions regarding pending legislation, evolving policies, and impending to-dos may not sound exciting. However, current marketing predictions show they are mission-critical to ensure consumers remain respected and protected while brands follow legal guidelines. The lackadaisical approach of checking the privacy box is in the past. Marketers should be having clear, candid discussions with their partners to understand how they are building privacy-first marketing solutions.
Follow the Right Marketing Predictions Powered by Data
These trends show that data-driven marketing practices evolve over time, and it’s important to steer in the right direction. We hope our predictions help you kickstart great campaigns in the fresh year ahead!
Interested in connecting with the AnalyticsIQ team to discuss these topics further? We’re ready to strategize. Reach out to our team emailing sales@analyticsiq.com, and we’ll match you with one of our vertical strategists to keep the conversation rolling.