As we're on the verge of seeing the disappearance of third-party cookies, what should marketers be thinking about? In this video, we'll look at the data points or innovations that marketers should consider to stay one step ahead of their competition.
What Other Data Points or Innovations Can Marketers Look at to Stay Ahead of Their Competition?
To stay one step ahead of the disappearance of third-party cookies, marketers should build a brand to earn their way onto their prospects and customer’s radar screens. So how do marketers stay in their email inboxes and social feeds?
Evaluate and think about the criteria used to decide what kind of content that you share. You shouldn't need to be dependent on interrupting your prospects with third-party cookie-triggered messages. There are much better ways to approach this. Go back to the basics and figure out ways to improve the conversion rates of your website, your landing pages, and your blog posts.
Your prospects have a fantastic incentive to upgrade their experience with your company, from that of an anonymous visitor to a known lead, a known subscriber, or a known prospect. So look at what you can do to provide more value to your anonymous visitors. First, make it a no-brainer for them to take your incentive that you're offering. Then, they will provide a little bit of their information in return for access to the great stuff that's sitting behind your landing page. That way, you can educate and build trust with them over time in a way that makes them comfortable.
How Does the Ban on Third-Party Affect Marketers?
In many ways, this reminds me of two earlier shifts in digital marketing over the previous decade. First, we saw the emergence of unknown keywords where Google stopped passing the search term keywords, which caused a visitor to arrive on your website from an organic search.
For example, 15 to 20 years ago, if someone typed a long-tail keyword search in a Google search engine and clicked on a search engine results page, they landed on your home page, website page, or blog post. As a result, you would be able to see in your website analytics exactly the keyword phrase that brought them in.
Fast-forward a few years; Google determined a tipping point where more than half of the global traffic on websites coming through search engines was now on mobile.
And they wanted to make sure that every mobile user had a good experience instead of a crappy user experience that was just desktop-driven. So we ended up with that algorithm shift called Mobilegeddon. Unknown keywords and Mobilegeddon forced innovation in much the same way that the disappearance of third-party cookies will improve the user experience, giving prospects and customers more of what they want. So in return, we're going to have to adapt. But how? The cookie ban is going to disproportionately impact marketers that focus on short-term results rather than being in it for the long term.
When your prospects and customers see your company and the team as industry experts and thought leaders, you won't have to work so hard. Instead, they will be convinced to part with a little bit of their contact information in return for access to great educational content.
How to Personalize Content Without Third-Party Cookies
When it comes to personalizing your content, consider going back to the basics on capturing leads and customer insight. The goal should be for you to know your prospects better than they know themselves.
What’s their next move? What causes someone to become educated enough to trust your company that they're promotable from a lead to a marketing qualified lead?
We're going to move them onto an opportunity, and we'll have a productive opportunity. All of this revolves around having a relentless approach to understanding what is in it for them, why prospects and customers are motivated, and why they pay attention to your company in the first place. So make sure you invest in customer insight research that will allow you to do a great job on your content personalization.
Because when you know that they're from a particular kind of buyer persona, and you know that they're at a particular stage of their buyer's journey, the intersection of those two factors makes it much easier to put a piece of content in front of the right person. And this content is relevant for who they are and where they are in their buyer’s journey. Relevant content is so much better than randomly and repeatedly hammering them with ads driven by third-party cookies or stalking them all over the web. We want to add value to their lives.
What Else Can be Done to Improve the Experiences Outside Of Personalization?
What else can be done to improve the prospect and customer experience? Buyer personas matter. It's essential to prioritize who your most important buyer personas are. We’ll often call this your primary or secondary buyer persona based on who has the most immediate and profound impact on your business as an economic stakeholder. Know who the primary and secondary buyer personas are and what their most important goals, plans, and challenges are, and how they prefer to learn.
It is a lot easier to build a plan once you know how they want to be educated. Then you can deliver the kind of information or educational content they want in the format they need. In other words, go right to those industry experts and their peers and host these amazingly impactful events that solve for what your prospects and customers are looking to learn from you.
So when it comes to improving the customer experience and the prospect experience, you need to put your most important buyer personas at the center of everything you do from a strategy implementation and investment standpoint. Remember, it's not about what you want; it’s not about what's keeping you up at two o'clock in the morning. It's all about them. And the sooner you can prioritize around that, the easier it is to be seen as trusted advisors. Experts earn a seat at the table in that first critical 60, 70, 80% of the digital-driven buyer's journey. That makes it a lot easier for marketers to know exactly what it takes to survive and thrive in an age where third-party cookies are broadly history.
If you found this helpful, feel free to leave a comment below. Also, let me know what you're doing to reinvent your marketing and sales playbook in an age where third-party cookies are rapidly facing extinction.
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