Discover MarTech: A Virtual Event for Strategies & Solutions | Natasha Khemraj

In late April, I attended my first virtual conference, Discovering MarTech: A Virtual Event for Strategies & Solutions.” The conference covered three sessions: Personalized UX in the Age of Privacy with Neil Tolbert, Marketing is Personal with Matthew Mobley, and The Awakening: How Covid-19 Will Change the Future of Digital Marketing with Mark Bornstein.  

During the first session presented by Neil Tolbert, Privacy & Marketing Consultant from One Trust PreferenceChoice, Neil advises companies of all sizes to drive engaging user experiences and build trust while demonstrating compliance of global data privacy regulations. Privacy laws shine a spotlight on the growing customer demand for privacy.

There are custom and granular types of consent and preferences which scale from regulatory compliance to customer experience. Regulated consent includes SMS, email, sharing, location, cookies, and tracking. Stated communication preferences span across content, frequency, and channels. Finally, experiential preferences are tailored specifically toward the customer can include team, food and beverage, partner engagement, and seat preference. Neil points out that, 

"This value of first party data is exponential and the growth of it will be as well. It starts with understanding how you identify someone and again this is shifting because of the technical limitations we’ll have. But once you identify them, how you start to progressively profile them across all of your different consumer touchpoints along that journey?"

This is done online through injecting more collection points for information. Websites usually make this a progressive experience and don’t do it all at once. Once you spend some time on their site, and jump from page to page, check out different products, over time they collect this information and utilize this first party data to better target and better personalize the customer’s experience. 

Chief Technology Officer at Merkle, Matthew Mobley discuses a world where the ability to know customers is becoming more and more limited by big tech. 

"There are two sides when we think about it. There is to know the person vs. as Cookie 1,2,3, or device identifier or whatever it is and then the asset. The understanding is what are their interests, what are their behaviors, what are there demographics, psychographics, these things that then describe who that person is so that we can begin to understand how to engage them. Their interest in our brand, the relevancy of our brand to them, our need to communicate with them, to share what we have to offer, is part of the understanding and we do that through profiling vs. knowing their identity." 

We should think of data and identity as a party continuum. The highest value you can have is to say as a brand “I know I am speaking to this person.” In a first party context, there is direct behavior and response from an individual that is able to describe them. In second and third party data there isn’t as high of a value but high opportunity including customer data share and third party acquired assets. At the end of the day there are levels that data must go through for the right information to be delivered to businesses. The first couple of steps are on the IT side where data is introduced to the platform and sensitivity and compliance rules are applied. The third step crosses over a bit from IT to the business side where data is transformed into a common language. Finally, the last two steps are for business use where exploration, visualization, and manipulation tools are used and data is exposed and managed by the business to service their needs.   

Mark Bornstein, VP of Marketing at ON24, looks at how everything changed in the blink of an eye during this crisis. People have found new and creative ways to stay connected and engaged in a digital world. And while we will eventually be able to leave our homes, expectations for our digital lives have been transformed forever. Marketing needs to evolve from impersonal spam to genuine human experiences including shifting to experiential marketing, creating multi-touch content experiences, personalizing outbound content, and rethinking the digital buyer’s journey. There are common teams that the affect of COVID-19 has on marketing. They are: in-person events lost as a channel to drive demand, marketing budgets became vulnerable, prospects are scrambling to adjust to their own realities, salespeople relegated to the phones and more pressure on marketing to drive buyer’s journey. Marketers are being asked to do more despite having less to work with including less resources and fewer channels. Although isolation has become mandatory due to lockdown restrictions, human engagement continues. With the rise of social distancing, we are seeking out new ways to connect, mostly through video chat. People may not physically be together but they are spending time together in more real and approachable ways. All of that is resonating and will dramatically affect the future of marketers. 

Audience expectations for how we connect online are fundamentally changing. The expectation people have for life online will be forever changed. We expect to connect in a more deeper and interactive way. From gathering consumer data, updating privacy laws to measuring success like frequency of reach and engagement rate, the usual marketing practices will have to be altered to fit a post COVID world.