ICYMI: Collective Measures’ eighth annual Digital Breakfast
On September 27, Collective Measures hosted its annual Digital Breakfast event to discuss and reflect on the unpredictable, accelerated marketing landscape — and key tactics and strategies marketers must adopt in 2023 and beyond to continue to drive success. Did you miss the event? Don’t worry — check out highlights from our keynote presentation and the client panel below.
Keynote presentation by Collective Measures
Marketing and consumer expectations are changing faster than ever before. This pace creates urgency, and this urgency creates disruption. The cause? Shifting consumer expectations, increasing macroeconomic factors, evolving media platforms, and more. And in the wake of this accelerated change, a gap has formed between consumer expectations and the services or products brands provide. According to Accenture, 64% of consumers wish companies would respond faster to meet changing needs, but 88% of executives think their customers are changing faster than their business can keep up. So, what’s a marketer to do?
To find success in 2023 and beyond, Collective Measures’ experts outlined a simple formula for marketers to follow to make the most of the available opportunity: Agility + Relevancy = Impact. Here are their thoughts on how to make this actionable in the year ahead through the lens of data, content, and full-funnel performance.
Agility through data
In today’s complex marketing landscape, marketers’ ability to balance speed against precision in decision-making processes will become a competitive advantage. But the only way to do this during times of uncertainty is to ensure that marketers have the information or data they need at their fingertips to make data-backed decisions when surrounded by disruption. Having the right data allows marketers to be agile as they navigate their brands through changing consumer behavior, macroeconomic trends, and so much more. By leveraging the massive amounts of data brands collect every day on their consumers, marketers can gain insight into how consumers are thinking about the brand and where they might be in the purchase cycle. This is because data are the connective tissue to consumers. However, because marketers collect so much data, this can have a paralyzing effect. Many don’t know which way to turn. To be successful and agile, brands must make sense of the signals from the data points and effectively execute against them.
Relevancy through content
Meeting intent with content is the most effective way to be relevant to audiences. This is especially true in the unpredictable landscape that is our reality. If brands miss the mark on meeting intent with relevant content, they may negatively impact revenue, experience, and perception. By using an empathic perspective, marketers can leverage relevant content to drive success for their brands. The secret to relevancy? It lives in understanding the audience’s intent, or in other words, understanding the “why” behind their needs and motivations. Only with this understanding can we start to effectively provide value through content efforts.
Impact through full-funnel performance
By leveraging the data available and utilizing relevant content, brands are able to remain agile and relevant to meet consumers needs. But, the impact only occurs when taking a full-funnel performance approach. An approach Collective Measures feels is best when faced with leveraging brand performance marketing. Brand performance marketing is focused on balancing awareness and performance media tactics to meet consumers where they are in their journey. How does this work? By leveraging a full-funnel approach, driving short-term success metrics from performance plans, and building long-term success by investing in awareness channels to drive brand discovery, brand performance marketing enables brands to realize their desired impact.
Agile and relevant brands can expect to see an impact when using the strategies discussed in our keynote presentation. But, why is this important now? Stated simply, brands are noticing the negative consequences of neglecting brand awareness and focusing solely on performance as they look toward the future. Companies who focused all of their effects on channel-dominant, performance-only strategies saw quick success and others followed suit trying to achieve the same. But after a lucrative period of time, brands became stagnant. The rapid growth slowed and brands optimized themselves out of effectiveness by converting all the available market demand. This now makes it harder for brands to keep pace, especially in a time of economic uncertainty and amplified disruption. While marketers may be hesitant to increase budgets during a time of lacking success and an uncertain future, brands need to maintain awareness and consideration. This will set the brand up for long-term success when the time is right for consumers to convert. Therefore, cutting budgets and shying away from the unknown is not the answer. By thinking ahead and infusing agility and relevancy into the brand, marketers can drive a true impact for their brand.
Client panel
Following Collective Measures’ keynote presentation, senior marketing leaders across a variety of industries shared their own experiences navigating today’s marketing landscape and what they believe the biggest obstacles and opportunities for marketers are in the year ahead. The biggest takeaways they shared? Here are what each of our panelists noted as key priorities for their marketing efforts in 2023:
“Putting the customer first. I think it sounds very simple, but it can be very challenging. When you think about the customer mindset and spending patterns, these are the data points that should be at the forefront of our conversations.” — Ann Vick, Vice President of Marketing at Room & Board
“Moving to a community-based approach. This will allow customers to not only interact with each other, but with the brand too. This will also allow you to have access to more data that can be used while creating solutions and products for customers.” — Sheila Conlon, Vice President of Marketing at Kyros
“Focusing on customer stickiness or repeat customers. This can be done by making sure that the marketing operations, product development teams, and the entire organization is grounded in customer data to deliver solutions for customers.” — Lindsay Early, Senior Director of Media Strategy at RVO Health
“Comparing how marketers are managing their data to how that aligns with the enterprise. I expect we will see some big changes in expectations for marketers about how to manage data effectively.” — Lizzy Foo Kune, Vice President of Marketing Data & Analytics at Gartner
“There have been some questions about data privacy. How do I keep customers’ data private from not only my company, but other companies? How can we use your data to give you what you want AND keep it private? This means we have to focus a lot on choice, clarity, and allowing users to opt out of any data collection.” — Maddy Nusser, Vice President of Creative, Content, UX, and Digital Marketing at Allstate Identity Protection
Overall, these senior marketers all agreed on one thing: marketing in today’s landscape is a challenge. With new disruptors entering the landscape at an accelerated pace, marketers must continue to put their customers first.
Key takeaways
Collective Measures’ eighth annual Digital Breakfast showcased potential roadblocks, and opportunities, marketers might encounter while planning for 2023 and beyond. Our key takeaway? Marketing in 2023 will bring challenges marketers must overcome, and there is no silver bullet to leverage. But, brands can turn the tide in their favor with patience and willingness to read audience signals, embrace the change, and practice agility and relevancy to create the desired impact.
