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Rise of Business Messaging/Chatbots | Marketing Automation- Ally to Brands | AI-Tailored Creative Personalisation | The Metaverse and Marketing | CEOs to Become the Face of Brands | Rise of CDPs

“Change” an inevitable part of life that ensures that we evolve and are ready to adapt to newer things is also applicable to the digital marketing world. With the gradual dip in the financial curve in 2022 and the imminent recession that has begun to take its toll on global markets, it is essential that every digital-first brand learns about the latest digital marketing trends and adapts to them as quickly as possible.

Here are some of the most recent trends in digital marketing that every brand looking for a virtual presence must account for.

The Rise of Business Messaging & Chatbots

Marketing chatbots are an AI-tailored technology that ensures spontaneous responses to customer queries and increases customer engagement. With this round-the-clock customer support tool, businesses can drive audiences from the awareness to the consideration funnel by educating them about the product and also build brand image by communicating and resolving consumer queries.

Here’s an example of how an AI-tailored chatbot would work:

Source: Social Beat

Having said that, the digital marketing trends in 2023 might demand that we take it up a notch. While great for resolving minor/easy consumer queries, we need to focus on adding a human touch to our responses (both audio and textual). This will not just help you in driving conversions, but will also help in improving your customer retention rate through personalised engagements.

Tip: Customer personas can contribute to personalising your responses by helping you understand which tonality is best consumed by your customers.

Having talked about marketing chatbots, and automated responses, another crucial digital marketing trend is the improved efficiency of marketing automation platforms.

Marketing Automation Will Become an Ally to Customer-First Brands

As popularly said by Sam Walton- “There is only one boss- The Customer.”

Customer experience has been a crucial digital marketing trend in every form of marketing and that aspect is not going to change anytime soon. However, with the precarious recession times that gradually plague the year 2022, CX will now be a cutthroat competition amongst brands.

While customer experience and personalisation have been in the talks for almost a decade now, only a handful of companies seem to have cracked this code. You might recollect making purchases on Amazon based on suggestions that popped up on your screen. And why won’t you? The offers that they targeted you with were personalized and exactly what you were looking for.

But at the same time, you often tend to ignore or spam-list offers sent by banks or insurance companies. 

This difference is majorly brought by the efficient use of customer data by relying on Martech platforms to automate lead nurturing and targeting the right set of audiences with relevant campaigns.

Did you know that nurtured leads can increase sales opportunities by over 20% compared to non-nurtured leads?

Source: Salesforce

If you have difficulty managing customer data or lack the manpower to do so, you can now easily rely on AI to do the grunt work. Marketing automation platforms like Salesforce can help you automate lead generation, cultivation and also tailor campaigns accordingly. 

Salesforce incorporates Einstein AI that can tailor product recommendations based on customer data interpretation and personalise services for individual customers. It can optimise your marketing performance by driving ROI and increasing spends with synergised AI-driven analytics. 

Moreover, Salesforce Genie, a customer real-time CRM can harmonise all customer data into individual customer graphs and empower industry departments by sharing relevant customer profiles to adapt to the customer’s activities in real time.

Here’s how we leveraged Salesforce to improve Mosiac’s audience engagement by 4.3%:

• We built consumer journeys to personalise communications based on the audience’s preferences.
• We reduced the overall manual work by 5% by automating the marketing operations.
• Created single views for the customer base through Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This further helped us in building omnichannel marketing campaigns and bolstering customer engagement.
• Increased overall farmer engagement by 4.3%

Hop on to this efficient digital marketing trend with us, we can help you automate your marketing ventures seamlessly!

Creative Personalisation Becomes Easier with Technology

While an engaging customer journey is a crux, ensuring that your campaigns hit the mark visually is equally important. Different audiences have varied preferences for consuming content and catering to these versatile preferences is a must for brands to execute successful campaigns.

For instance, we personalised campaigns for Boat by incorporating creatives that resonate with their versatile range of audience bases on Instagram, Facebook and Google.

These personalised campaigns catered to wide audience bases be it fitness enthusiasts, Gamers, Marvel lovers, etc. and helped us garner up to a 2X ROAS (Return on Ad Spends) amongst the gaming audience and up to a 42% increase in CTR (Click-Through Rates) amongst the sports enthusiasts.

Source: Social Beat

However, catering to such versatile audience bases and working on bulk creatives for tight campaign deadlines requires a great deal of manual work and this is where creative personalisation platforms can play a vital role.

Rocketium, a creative automation platform can help personalise campaign creatives by adapting to different publishing channels, editing bulk creatives and generating highly relevant campaigns. Not just that, you can also create visuals from scratch or auto-generate Copywriter content and ensure omnichannel integration.

Similarly, Dall-E an automated deep learning module can help in generating digital images by combining concept notes seamlessly. It incorporates “Prompts” where you can type in commands and the AI-tailored application will render images accordingly.

BENEFITS:

• Reduces manual work drastically and saves time.
• It is cost-effective and can reduce the requirement of a heavy design team.
• Creatives produced incorporate prompts fed in manually. These are ideal for personalising campaigns through creatives that resonate with a brand’s language.
• You can produce creatives in bulk and save a lot of time and energy that you can spend towards brainstorming and ideating even better campaigns.

With such automated creative platforms on the rise, creative personalisation of campaigns becomes a lot easier and hence this is another digital marketing trend that brands should definitely consider aligning with.

The Metaverse is Here- But it Will Take Time to Catch Up With Marketers!

Talking about new trends in digital marketing, here is the most anticipated one for the Gen Zs- The Metaverse marketing! But what is the metaverse digital marketing experience?

It is a simulated digital ecosystem structured by components like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Blockchain along with an in-depth integration with social media that virtually replicates the physical world. This opens up a whole new world for brands to launch products and even newer methods for marketers to promote these products.

According to Gartner, by the year 2026, about 25% of the population will spend at least an hour every day in the metaverse.

And truly so, major companies like Shopify, Nike, Coca-Cola and Samsung have already set foot into the metaverse with their marketing campaigns. 

While it opens up opportunities to enhance the digital customer experience by exponential values, Metaverse will still require time to catch up with marketers. Why?

1. Accessibility:Accessing the Metaverse has a minimum requirement of a high-spec computer with really fast internet reception and a VR headset. While some enthusiasts wouldn’t mind investing in these accessories, a major chunk of the audience finds it difficult to purchase such pricey units.
2. Sceptical Audiences: Many people are still sceptical about the Metaverse and do not visualise it as anything more than a high-stimulus video game. Despite highly intellectual tech professionals explaining the importance and significant growth of the Metaverse, the larger audience is still not persuaded. This in turn hinders the mass production of relevant gadgets to put the Metaverse in full throttle. 
3. Data Privacy and Security Concerns:Currently, the Metaverse is open to all users and incorporates zero filters as to who can access it. Moreover, there is no regulating authority or guidelines to maintain order. Thus, brands would be apprehensive about promoting products within the Metaverse.According to Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President- Security, Compliance and Identity-Microsoft, the Metaverse will bring about an outburst in infrastructure, devices, apps and data; and with it, an even greater magnitude of attack-surface.
4. Lack of Metrics Gauges:Traditional methods of gauging performance metrics won’t be applicable to the futuristic Metaverse and thus, there are no provisions to check a campaign’s performance.

However, note that these challenges do not suggest that the Metaverse is not a good digital marketing trend to delve into. Rather, it is just a bit too soon for it to catch up with marketers. Thus, it is crucial that brands hop on to this new digital marketing trend and use this time to learn how the Metaverse works. Brands can understand how the Metaverse improves the digital marketing experience by and executing test campaigns in it. This will give them an edge over their competitors when the Metaverse starts functioning seamlessly. 

There’s a New Face in Town- Founders and CEOs To Be The Face of Brands

While influencers and celebrity ambassadors with their herculean follower count have been the face of most brands for a long time now, we are approaching a gradual concentration of platforms. 

This opens up gates for founders and CEOs to propagate and represent their brands themselves, thereby giving businesses a personalised face value.

Digital marketing trends show an increase in the number of founders coming out and lending their personas to brands. Major C-suite leaders like Elon Musk, Jamshedji Tata, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs have come forward and represented their brands. Moreover, customer-centric actions like tweet responses to general customers, and the daily life of such CEOs can have a pivotal impact on how audiences perceive their brands.

For example, Elon Musk’s customer redressal and immediate support helped not just humanise the brand but also speak loads about its credibility. 

Source: BigSpeak

Similarly, news about Jamshedji Tata visiting his aged employee and looking after the wellness of his other employees speaks loads about his integrity and adds value to his brand.

Having said that, giving a human face to your brand might also seem precarious as a negative backlash over a hasty tweet or one misconduct by the founder can end up hurting the entire brand as in the case of Ashneer Grover, the Founder of BharatPe.

Thus, while it is advised to adapt to the new trends in digital marketing, be careful and analyse exactly what your brand requires before acting on those lines.

The Rise of CDPs- The Answer to A Cookieless World

While customer data is the key to personalising campaigns, it also poses another challenge for brands- the increase in data silos throughout the consumer journey and the efficient interpretation of this data.

For example, you might reach out to your customer in the form of an advertisement or a newsletter that the user accesses from a different device and a different IP address (either at work or at home) and then visits your website from a completely different device or network. This leads to multiple data entries for the same customer across platform-specific data silos. And this scattered data is what entangles brands and can result in breaches in the updated privacy norms. 

With increasing emphasis on the customer’s data privacy and multiple privacy norms in place, it is essential now more than ever that brands get aligned with Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Wondering why?

1. Comply with privacy norms laid down in the GDPR:
   Customer Data Platforms are designed to find, collate and synergise all the data available on a user. This helps in complying with the GDPR norm of assembling, sharing, correcting and deleting personal data (on customer request).
2. Flexible usage of data:
    CDPs are meticulously designed to be flexible and allow different platforms to access and use data silos as directed by their data controller. Thus, CDP marketing ensures the much-needed flexibility of data usage across platforms- a definite requirement for personalised brand campaigns.
3. Easier consumer data deletion:
   A CDP’s ability to cumulate desperate and scattered data into individual customer profiles also offer another service that ensures privacy compliance- “Deletion of personal data”.When a customer finds a brand irrelevant and wants an out, Customer Data Platforms can help break down data silos and delete customer data while preserving the customer data analytics of the campaign.

Thus, with such herculean loads of duplicate customer data stacked up somewhere in between platform-level data silos, it is very likely that brands will unintentionally breach privacy norms. And with severe actions set in place against such breaches, it is paramount that brands invest in a well-integrated customer data platform to safeguard their marketing ventures. What’s more encouraging is the exponential reduction in efforts to scale up campaign results that these Customer Data Platforms have to offer!!

Let’s Sum It Up

While the world was still licking its wounds dealt by the COVID pandemic, we had another global event, the Russia-Ukraine incident. With major blows to the global economic framework, a recession was never out of the question. With such shifts in the global economy and in the wake of worldwide layoffs customer behaviour changes and so do digital marketing trends. Right from the rise of automated marketing chatbots, to the personalization of brands through marketing automation platforms, we have discussed in detail all the digital marketing updates that brands need to be equipped with to brace 2023.

While a customer-centric approach has been and will always be the crux of every successful marketing strategy, it is essential that we also keep an eye on futuristic happenings. While you currently cater to the millennials and Gen Zs, the little ones (Gen alpha) who will soon become the spending force in the near future must not be left out of your marketing strategies. Thus, brands must also prepare for the futuristic eutopia of the metaverse that will soon become a major marketing platform (probably not in 2023, but definitely in the very near future).

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