Personalized Messages, Advertising Analytics are Key 2020 Marketing Trends

Media Director Travis Ziemke believes authentic, streamlined content released with a purposeful and integrated approach will resonate with audiences this year. That will mean creating ad campaigns with personalized messages and sharing those messages across numerous channels at the right frequency with a integrated strategy. Marketers will also need to pay close attention to analytics to achieve the strongest possible ROI.

“Having an authentic message is necessary going forward,” said Travis. “There’s so much clutter out there that the more authentic we can be, the more it’s going to resonate with audiences. We’re going to get them to spend time with us versus the competition because we’ve told the brand’s story in a more genuine way.”

So how do brands balance authenticity while trying to grab attention? Personalization is going to be crucial.

“Marketers are going to tailor their message to the audience they’re targeting, whether by platform or message,” Travis said. “By personalizing the message, we’re hoping it will resonate more with audiences, creating more engagement and more time spent with the brand.”

Brands must share honest messages with their audiences about what makes them unique and their business worthy of customers’ time, trust and money. And while those messages must be true to gain the respect of 2020’s savvy consumers, there’s no harm in calling attention to the pieces of a business’ mission statement that most relate to a particular audience segment.

“We want our message to be cohesive,” Travis said. “While the tone might be different across platforms, the message will be the same.”

So does that mean brands should juggle dozens of platforms at once, pretending they have unlimited resources in the next decade? Do all brands need an immediate update, forgoing printed advertisements and radio campaigns in favor of pushing out content on TikTok and Instagram? Absolutely not.

“People are consuming more media but in a much more fragmented way,” Travis said. “There are a lot of options out there now, so we need to make sure we’re that much more strategic. We have to use the right message in the right space to target the audience we want to reach.”

The key is to streamline your approach, advertising on specific platforms that work with your brand’s message and align with your audience. Additionally, make sure the mediums where you’re trying to share a message reflect the types of content you are able to produce.

While there is no secret combination of platforms to reach ultimate marketing success, marketers are benefiting from new platforms that provide better access to audience data. Our Media Department has noticed that Connected TV — advertising on televisions connected to the internet — is becoming more popular in the digital and increasingly video-centric age. It allows us to layer different data segments and target by app and demographic.

Data will continue to inform our marketing plans in the next decade.

“We don’t want to just run the campaign. We want to make sense of the campaign,” Travis said. “We’ll look at the numbers right after we launch. We’ll look at them through the campaign and at the end. We want to know that campaign’s successes and where we can improve next time. We want to paint that picture for the client.”

One way we optimize campaigns is by A/B testing creative assets — usually copy, visuals or combinations thereof. We couldn’t do this without an integrated plan and a team members from all our agency’s departments.

“We’re constantly working with the creative team,” Travis said. “We’ll run multiple pieces of creative at one time to see which is best resonating with the audience, and we’ll make modifications to that campaign and work with the creative team to update the creative elements.”

And though data is making a huge impact on advertisers’ decisions already, the next decade will bring changes in how that data is collected. Google recently announced plans to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome. Cookies are a piece of code that attaches to a visitor’s browser and tracks their activity as they navigate through other websites and pages. Third-party cookies help advertisers leverage user data to serve more relevant ads, instead of a barrage of random advertisements with no personalization. In the next few years, Trilix will help our clients collect more first-party data so we can continue to strategize about how best to use their resources to reach customers.