Fractional, Personal Marketing & Changes in Consumer Privacy

Consumer Behavior and Navigating the Digital Marketing Space

As consumer behavior changes, digital marketers have started to feel the constraint. The constraint is pushing marketers to become more innovative. While marketers are being forced to expand their abilities and cleverness, it also allows them to try new and different things.

As it becomes increasingly easier for the common person to generate their ads and start their campaigns, a digital marketer is now forced to navigate this. As ad platforms make things easier, marketers see that AI needs to lend a guiding human hand that is ultimately more mature than AI. Looking at the consumer’s behavioral changes, the changing buying climate, we learn about what the future can hold.

How Has Consumer Behavior Changed?

Buying behavior has changed and likely will not go back to the way it was. Consumers are now shopping at all hours, every day of the week. The buying space has also been affected. Consumers are more brand-conscious than ever, looking at brand alignment and a brand’s messaging before doing any purchasing.

The buying space became more about who the brand was and less about finding the lowest price for a product. Companies are being forced to take a different approach to their marketing and their brand itself.

With the consumer’s sensitivity to brand messaging came the platform and channel’s hypersensitivity. Channels are now cracking down, working hard to take down ads and brands weighing in on controversial topics. While the channels are taking down the bad ads, they also affect the good ads and brands.

What Has Come Out of the New Buying Climate?

As channels have started to work harder to control controversial ads in some way, they have incorporated more machine learning. While machine learning aids in the fact that a manual support team would not do the same amount of work for such large channels, it hurts some ads because machine learning is not perfect. This has caused marketing to work with this hypersensitivity to avoid having ads taken down.

Fractional Marketing and the Consumer Relationship

While fractional marketing is newer to mass marketing, we are starting to see its benefits. Placing ads on smaller platforms, such as Reddit, creates a different relationship with the consumer. The good thing about this relationship-authority trust marketing is that it meets the consumer where they are.

While brands want to be where the people are, marketing on smaller platforms can bring them to their target audience. If the opportunity to use the unique audience targeting on smaller platforms arises and the brand can hone in on the audience and give them what they want, it will wholly benefit the brand.

Audience Awareness

Meeting the consumer where they are will also nurture a relationship between the brand and consumer. Today’s audience is smart and passionate and has no problem tearing a brand down if they are found to be fake or say and do something that the public reads through a negative lens.

With the audience being more aware than ever, a more inclusive messaging with marketing and brands being held more accountable is being set. Consumers want to feel seen by brands, particularly those they stand with and feel loyalty towards. While a brand cannot please everyone, its messaging and alignment can reflect its values and the values of its audience, which will only strengthen its brand-consumer relationship.

Consumers have also become more aware of their privacy. Apple announced their new privacy policies had brought privacy issues to the forefront of the consumer’s mind. While Apple has given the people what they want—more privacy—it has made marketing more difficult.

With the new privacy policy, many audiences targeting abilities will no longer be viable, meaning less ad optimization. Now, brands will need to turn to their connection with the consumers to give their information.

You can focus on using lead-gen campaigns to get consumer information to optimize your ads. Poll in to gain information and get the data that you’re no longer able to while also keeping that connection with the consumer.

The Roles of Product Marketing and Demand Generation Teams

The product marketing and demand generation teams work together to create the funnel of creation. This means the content and ads are continually being outputted to the audience.

Product marketing teams hold ownership over the marketing strategy, and part of that strategy is working alongside the demand gen team. The demand gen team is there to help find the right brand messaging, the right content to output, and they can help find the right target audience.

As product needs, consumption, and awareness of brand alignment have changed with the consumer, you need a mature product marketing team to meet those consumers. In addition, to meet future needs, product marketing must meet the current requirements.

The system of teams, product marketing, demand gen, sales, and customer success, must be cohesive machines and guide each other to succeed. In addition, the more eyes on any ads that are being put out there, the more consumers it could resonate with.

The Future of Marketing

To satisfy the consumer in the future, it’s essential to look at the entire landscape of the market. Instead of only looking at what ad platforms are doing, look at everything from a broader lens. Eventually, everything you’re doing in the marketing department will be outdated.

If you are prepared for the future, you won’t have to play catch up. Be in tune with the consumer; what they want, what they need, how they want things to be presented to them, how to make their experience better. Being able to better the customer experience can result in higher conversions.

While Google and Facebook are some of the bigger channels, looking to the smaller platforms can be helpful and maybe what is desired in the future. Continue to learn and understand all of your marketing options while continually considering the consumer’s boundaries—political, environmental, etc.—and privacy.

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