GDPR. Four letters that brought fear, panic, and frustration for marketers worldwide during 2017. But smart marketers are sensing the opportunity and building marketing programs that will help them thrive despite tighter regulation.
Tighter controls around opt-in will be great for consumers, but will prove a short-term headache for marketers: increasing the cost to acquire marketable leads, and thus new customers. As the cost of acquiring new customers increases, marketers will be provoked to increase their focus on up-selling and cross-selling to existing customers.
Ragy Thomas, founder of Sprinklr, believes existing customers represent a huge opportunity for most businesses. In his presentation at WebSummit 2017, he speculated that 80% of revenue for an average company comes from 20% of its existing customers.
Providing better care to these customers is, Ragy surmises, a key way to increase revenue: and this requires customer care and marketing to be delivered as a unified customer experience.
“Customer care is the new marketing”
The content bar will be raised
Delivering great customer experience requires personalised marketing that informs, educates, and stimulates action. Success requires valuable content that resonates with each customer – delivered in the right formats, at the right times, through the right channels.
Delivering to such standards requires a detailed and fluid understanding of each customer, and the programmatic use of data to ensure content consistently hits the mark, in the long-term. In the new GDPR landscape, the brands that don’t capitalise on this approach will risk losing market share.
A new equilibrium
Raising the quality of content marketing will – ultimately – improve customer acquisition efforts, completing the cycle and establishing a new equilibrium. Delivering more valuable content will provide a stronger incentive to opt-in, and subsequently, more effective nurture combined with increased customer trust will improve conversion through the marketing funnel.
On reflection, while GDPR may prove difficult for marketers in its initial months of implementation, smart marketers will grab the opportunity to deliver mutual benefits to their customers and their businesses. Those that succeed will deliver more effective content marketing and will provide a fair exchange of value that will deepen long-term relationships with their customers.
Following on from GDPR, my next trend blog will explore brand authenticity and the need for marketers to remain truthful in an increasingly sceptical environment.
