Wunderkind have released their CMO State of the Union report. They interviewed a bunch of Chief Marketing Officers and then compiled their responses into a report.
As content marketing, it got my email address, so I guess it worked, but there were no big surprises in the report. As the world migrates to more privacy consciousness, all the tools and tricks that turned people into numbers on a spreadsheet are starting to be un-done.
Without cookies to track your data, visitors to a website could be anyone until they login to their account. This means our experiences might be less customised, but it also means marketers need to be more aware of people *gasp* as unique individuals.
Apple made some big changes to the world of Facebook marketing when customers had to opt-in to allowing Facebook Pixel to track their movements when they clicked on an advertisement. Of course most people said NO THANKS and noped out of there so hard even the NOPE octopus was left for dust. But it means that marketers who relied on the data no longer had back up statistics to prove their value.
As I’m part of the industry, I can definitely see why we want to track a customer’s experience of our online presence. We can use that information to spot where transactions come to a halt, and then look at ways to fix the issues. We still have Google Analytics but the data will change. If you’re getting visitors and no sales, maybe it’s your copy, or your site is chaotic and uncomfortable, or maybe your photos need a refresh. But if you don’t know that people are coming to your site at all, and what they do there, then you’re shooting in the dark.
However as a customer of the same industry, there’s a part of me that’s delighted that in future I’ll have to be treated like a unique person. Maybe customer service will end up being less chatbots and more actual people. Maybe as a society we’ll move away from the big psychopathic business model we’ve favoured for the last few millenia and move into something more flexible, more people and environment driven. Maybe. 😉
As a people driven business, we love working with people who love their thing, and just wanna do their thing. How about we meet in the middle, and let you do the things you love, and we’ll do the things we love – building great websites, building people driven businesses, and awesome digital marketing.
