Welcome to the Future of Marketing Technology series, derived from the words, sentiments, and emotions of global marketers.
The number of articles, blogs, videos, and polls investigating marketing technology is truly staggering. It’s no surprise given that the market size is estimated at more than USD $300b.
Here at Glimpse we wanted to listen to the language, sentiments, and emotions of marketing decision makers as they grappled with the future of their discipline—and their hopes and fears about marketing technology.
So we’re launching a short series of studies before and after New Year’s 2022-2023.
Here are the first three planned posts:
Disappearing Cookies
How are experienced marketers dealing with Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies? Are marketers approaching first-party data in new ways?
Barriers to the Realizing ML/AI Value in Marketing–Right Now
The successful application of ML/AI technology requires the right people, processes, and investments. Which barriers are marketers now finding it most difficult to overcome?
Marketing and the Metaverse
If the Metaverse is the future of the Internet, then what’s the future of digital marketing? If marketers don’t take the plunge soon, will they get left in the cold?
Glimpse’s goal is to help marketers with all of these challenges, by providing a more complete picture of trends, tracking the adoption of new technologies, and achieving better customer understanding.
Disappearing Cookies
Three Key Findings:
42% of marketing functions are planning increased investments of money, time, or talent in gathering or analyzing first party data in response to the phasing out of third-party cookies. Another 28% aren’t yet sure.
Those marketers whose organizations are planning increased investments in first-party data are optimistic about the future, with 55% sharing their plans along with positive sentiment, and experiencing ‘joy,’ ‘love,’ and ‘optimism’ as dominant emotions.
But the transition will also face obstacles. In order, the top four obstacles selected were:
Finding better ways to engage existing customers (37%): 1. Finding better ways to engage the right (non-customer) audiences (34%) 2. Finding better ways to generate insights from first-party data (30%)
3. Finding better ways to gather unstructured or conversational first-party data (16%)
Glimpse is here to help with all of these challenges. We find marketers the right non-customer audiences, help them engage all audiences more effectively to rapidly gather powerful first-party data, and then speed the path to actionable insights.
The Article
Whether or not they discuss it publicly, most businesses have long relied on third-party cookies to monitor and analyze the behavior of users across websites and applications. (A cookie is data from a website that’s stored within a browser.)
But the world is shifting beneath the feet of marketers.
This movement away from third-party data is also reshaping the relationships of brands with customers. Brands will now increasingly need to ask prospects and customers for information, usually by offering something of value in return. (First-party data is collected directly from customers by a brand and is owned by that brand.)
We launched a study to 113 US-based marketing decision makers and asked them about their mindsets and plans for the future:
About 42% of marketers expect small changes because they’ve always relied more on first-party data. Another 15% expect their lives to get “a lot harder,” while about the same number actually expect their professional lives to get “a lot easier.”
What’s important is how marketers are planning on changing their behavior in response to the shift.
A full 42% of marketing decision makers say that their organizations are planning increased investments in gathering and analyzing first-party data. While 28% aren’t sure.
For those marketers whose organizations are investing in first-party data, their natural language responses to a question about specific first-party data initiatives reveal high levels of positive sentiment and emotion: ‘joy,’ ‘hope,’ ‘love,’ ‘optimism,’ ‘excitement,’ ‘confidence,’ and ‘interest.’
This marketing manager from Philadelphia (for a company with revenues of between $100-$249m/year) plans to use first-party data to build customer value.
This marketing manager from Salt Lake City (for a company with revenues of between $250-499m/year) is expanding her organization’s CRM, to ask customers to share more information about themselves.
This marketing manager from Boston (for a company with revenues of between $250-499m/year) is relying on Facebook and customer phone calls in addition–in order to improve the international tours her company provides.
While this marketing manager from Knoxville is investing in first-party mobile data analytics capabilities from a new vendor.
But the transition won’t be easy for many.
When it comes to first-party data strategy, marketing decision makers face an array of challenges. In order of frequency, the top four selected were:
Finding better ways to engage existing customers (37%)
Finding better ways to engage the right (non-customer) audiences (34%)
Finding better ways to generate insights from first-party data (30%)
Finding better ways to gather unstructured or conversational first-party data (16%)
Here are some representative comments about those challenges:
This marketing manager from Houston (for a company making between $100,000-$249,000/year) is frustrated because first-party data isn’t as comprehensive as third-party data.
This marketing manager from Richmond (for a small business making less than $100,000/year) is concerned about frustrating new customers with data-sharing requests.
This marketing manager from Denver (for a financial services company making more than $1b/year) is frustrated that her leadership isn’t willing to invest in first-party data, leading to engagement and retention problems.
While this marketing analyst from New York (for a company making between $25-50m/year) is searching for a way to code and analyze unstructured data (one of Glimpse’s strengths!).
Over the next couple of years, marketers in most markets and industries will work to find innovative ways to engage audiences, collect relevant data (including richer, more valuable conversational data), and generate actionable insights.
Glimpse will be here to help! Not only with frequent studies of marketing decision makers and the customers they care about, but also with the power of the Glimpse human response platform.
For now, this comic captures the challenge and the opportunity perfectly:
We believe that listening to the words, emotions, and sentiments of audiences is one of the best ways to generate actionable and predictive insights about the world. Stay tuned for more Glimpse studies on global political and economic trends, the vicissitudes of brand performance, and the state of the marketing and communications industries.
Glimpse is a quick-turn, self-serve human response platform that focuses on language, emotion & sentiment, sorted and analyzed in real-time and OVER time. . .
… providing actionable insights and content for marketers, communicators, and creators.
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