A New Era of Customer Engagement (In a Privacy-First World)
To improve your brand’s engagement ratios, it is crucial to improve the areas of Data, Channels and Content. Here’s how to do it in a privacy-proof way.
The market has been talking about Customer Experience for the last ten years, and it is not over. Marketing campaigns nowadays are not based on the product anymore, or the service brands are offering.
Instead, they are based on exceptional experiences, enhancing people’s emotions, and are often personalized to the consumer’s behaviors. This is how marketers are building new archetypes of consumers, not segments of customers anymore.
Consumers are now dictating what they want, when they want it and how they want to receive it. And on top of it they want it safe, fast, and now!
But, considering the change in how people are behaving throughout their digital purchasing journey in the last few years, it is time for brands to enhance their Customer Engagement strategy.
To improve your brand’s engagement ratios, it is crucial to improve the areas of:
- Data
- Channels
- Content
Let’s examine each area further.
Which type of data do you have, and what are you using it for?
Collecting the right data (and not any data) and using it for the right purpose will allow your brand to become way more meaningful to your customers. And if you are meaningful to them, they will become your best ambassadors.
This is part of a needed digitization of data management and marketing automation processes, as well as the introduction of the right MarTech platforms to make future Engagement Marketing campaigns more profitable.
The other important matter regarding consumer data is privacy.
As we are moving towards a digital world free of third-party cookies soon, it will have huge implications on how brands get access to qualified and personalized information about their existing customers. It will also impact the way they get access to new consumers who are yet to convert.
Soon, brands will have no other option to guarantee privacy-proof data collection and use, if they want to continue personalizing their marketing campaigns.
Is there a secret to this? Simple — give control back to your customers.
If you want privacy-proof data, you need to ask your customers for it directly! People need to be educated about how important their personal data is. Accurate consumer data — often referred to as “the new oil” — has an enormous value for brands.
If consumers would be able to manage and exchange their data on single privacy-proof platforms, you would have an alternative option to obtain consumer data directly from the individual (ethically sourced and consented). Such a platform could be a new source of accurate data, as well as an innovative marketing and communications channel.
This is exactly what Profila can be used for.
Let your customers tell you when you can (re)target them, how often and on which channel. This will become an amazing conversion driver and therefore enhance your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
Also, having a single place for managing real customer data will be highly beneficial because nobody today can evaluate the quality of targeted ads. Brands are certainly paying way too much to retarget an existing customer.
With Profila, you can incentivize customers to learn about data privacy and make asserting their data privacy rights simpler. You can use such a channel to listen to your customers and be more transparent about what you do with their data. By giving control back to them, they will understand the value of personalized communication from your brand much better.
Which channels are you using, and how?
Here also it is the customer who should be in the driver’s seat, and it is logical. Each customer is unique and they all behave differently when they interact with their favourite brands.
It is up to brands to have the right automation process in place to engage with their customers only when they tell them to do so.
Again, this will have a significant impact on the profitability of these communication campaigns.
What is also clear is that brands need to be highly creative in content creation and adapt their messages and ad formats to all different channels. Obviously, social platforms are becoming the most important channels for brands to advertise through a strong engagement strategy.
These platforms provide a fantastic way to reach consumers in a more personal and direct way, allowing brands to avoid costly third-party platforms to reach new customers.
There is no loyalty to a channel anymore. Engage with your consumers where they are and make sure to adapt the content to that channel. Automation and integrated MarTech is an absolute must!
The way you use social platforms will impact your brand’s marketing strategy in multiple ways:
- Increase the level of personalized engagement touchpoints you have with your customers that will positively impact the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value),
- Harmonize the consistency of your CX (Customer Experience) — 360° — enhancing your brand awareness,
- Emphasize your digital brand reputation by adding ideas and emotions that customers can associate to the brand, supported by excellent customer service. This is a great intangible asset for any marketer.
Customer engagement is the flow of interactions between a brand and its potential or existing consumers. Measuring the efficiency and performance is based on the number of lasting relationships created between your brand and your audience. These cannot be built on one-off interactions.
You need to create authentic user stories and deliver value to your digital consumers.
This brings us to the third aspect of improving your customer engagement.
Which content are you creating (and how are you distributing it)?
The importance of content creation in marketing cannot be overstated. I have always been a huge fan of brands significantly increasing the resources (human, technology, tools, and budget) for strong and dedicated content creation capabilities.
This is unfortunately not often the case, as content creation is still seen as a “fluffy” cost centre. And the solution is often to outsource this task, which is not always ideal.
The value of a strong content marketing strategy is based on long-term capabilities and investment in the right content creation automation tool or software.
You need to aim for a good balance between “always-on” content pieces helping to build strong brand awareness and “tactical one-off” content supporting marketing campaigns with a specific business objective. The quality and the variety of your content will also impact your inbound marketing activities.
You want to be seen as an expert in your domain and lead the crowd by providing solutions instead of always highlighting a problem.
So, the answer is to build a strong content creation team that is customer engagement centric.
The engaging content you create will also serve your brand awareness in the best way possible, in some ways your acquisition and always your retention capabilities.
How can Zero Knowledge Advertising & Blockchain help?
At Profila, we are convinced that Zero-Knowledge Advertising associated with Blockchain technology will support these new privacy-proof marketing strategies.
But what do we mean by Zero-Knowledge Advertising (ZKA)?
It is based on the Zero-Knowledge Proof Protocol — a cryptographic algorithm in which the personal data and identity of a set of consumers remains fully anonymized, but the parties using this data can verify the authenticity of it without sharing the data.
Via ZKA, a consumer can opt-in to see highly relevant ads from your brand, without the exchange of personal data from a consumer for merely seeing the ad. It is only when a consumer chooses to buy a product or service based on that ad that only a subset of data is shared for you to deliver the product or service.
This way, ZKA prevents the mass distribution, publication and sharing of people’s online activity (and interactions with ads), while still guaranteeing personalized advertising in a privacy-compliant way.
A consumer can also turn off the ZKA function for its favourite brands, by saying “As my favourite brand, you get access to my data, you know it is the correct data, you can still target me and personalize your ads to me based on my preferences. I will tell you how many times you can contact me and via which channel…”
All this is enabled by Blockchain technology to guarantee ad delivery to the correct person, as well as the anonymity of the ad delivery (via a peer-to-peer network of other Profila users who help keep the identity of the ad recipient from being shared in the Ad ecosystem).
We are entering a new era where Customer Engagement marketing strategies will be based on consumers giving brands access to highly qualified data, fully anonymized. In return, brands will give consumers control of their own data back.
We at Profila are providing this new-era data — a privacy-first customer engagement and marketing platform designed for consumers and delivered for brands.
What impact will this have for brands?
Quite simply, the qualification and anonymization of data will help you to significantly increase your CVR (Conversion Rate). It is important to keep in mind that increasing CVR with existing consumers is much cheaper than acquiring new customers.
This directly impacts the EBITDA of your company.
Also, as we will enhance the quality and the quantity of data in customers’ digital profiles, we will support the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) optimization.
This can have a direct impact on your Loyalty Program members’ activity.
The conclusion
You have amazing customers, but you have also amazing competitors that are going after them, all the time. Make sure you know them better so you can engage with them in a unique matter: when they want, using their favourite channel and with highly personalized content.
And all this on a Privacy-Proof platform integrated with your MarTech stack.
