Mark Newcomer, chief strategy officer, Mirum
With mobile, voice, chat AI, Amazon and niche search at consumers’ disposal, it’s obvious how the traditional marketing “funnel” has been flipped on its head, making a marketer’s job much more complicated when it comes to implementing these tools to drive conversions and sales.
At the end of the day, marketers must be looking for moments they can understand, build context around, influence, and help people do something. The key, however, is to realize that while a lot is changing, we don’t necessarily have to “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and we can still use things that we know work to move the ball forward instead of setting our hair on fire.
Let’s start with customer experience. My colleague, Mitch Joel, has said “let’s avoid bad search.” I couldn’t agree more. When you’ve already bought something but it still follows you around the web for 2 or 3 days, not only is that a bad experience, it’s a waste of money for clients.
This year, I see a revival in marketing technology, particularly marketing resource management. This was the rave ten years ago with companies like Aprimo and Unica. When we have so many campaigns going and many different types of media spends with different content types coming in and out of play, we need a better way to bubble it all up and give chief marketing officers a top-down view of what’s happening.
Digital asset management has been an underdog in the MarTech stack the last couple of years and as we atomize content and think about multiple headlines, images and placements, we need effective ways to put it all together—and remember that it comes from one central source. Look for digital asset management and the role it plays in performance marketing to increase in 2018, as we need to pull from many different sources.
If 2018 is going to be the year for voice and AI, one of the things a lot of brands may not be thinking about is that we need to train our bots and AI engines. What the Googles, Facebooks and car companies of the world have going for them is tons of data that have been working these machines for a long time. If you’re just getting into the AI space or putting a bot out that you hope is going to get smarter, you need to start thinking about data vendors like Crowdflow, Kaggle or MightyAI, companies that will give you some of that content in order to train your AI or bot intelligence. Otherwise it could take you years to get them smart enough.
Keep in mind the complexity of the space and new approaches as you’re connecting across all these different touchpoints. If you can spend time to find out how they all connect to one another, you’ll do well. Think “personalized for the moment” —the more you can figure out how to get the right content to the right person in the right context, you’ll find success.
Remember that there’s more than just Google and Facebook in the world. Yes, that’s where a lot of content is going—and where a lot of content and advertising has been for a long time—but there are a lot of niche engines out there that have also been doing a lot of heavy lifting, like how you search for something with Uber, TripAdvisor or Postmates. So start thinking beyond what we call “the new traditional” for places to put your media.
I’ve also been asked a lot about how important good writers and researchers are to developing content for an improved customer experience.
In 2018, with voice moving to the fore, that’s critical. People are online to find and consume content, and for a long time we’ve let content be the thing that just “fills” the internet, making consumers work hard to cut through the clutter. For brands that want to differentiate themselves in the market, you must have great content, which comes from understanding what people want to read (or hear!) and the format they want it in.
The next “amp up” for customer experience is going to be the content inside of it, so don’t cut corners when it comes to hiring the kind of talent that can make your brand memorable and one that consumers keep coming back to.
Mirum is a digital agency and part of global advertising and public relations firm WPP plc.
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