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Author: Gaurav Gupta

User Journey Marketing: The Next frontier in Digital Marketing

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User Journey Marketing: The Next frontier in Digital Marketing

Posted on by Gaurav Gupta

Introduction

In today’s digital age, simply advertising our products or services to potential customers is no longer sufficient. Businesses must focus on creating a personalised experience for their audience in order to truly make an impact and stand out in a crowded marketplace. This is where user journey marketing comes in. By mapping out our ideal customers’ moment of interactions with our brand, we can gain a deeper understanding of their needs and behaviour. This can then be used to tailor our marketing initiatives to directly address our customer’s interests and demands before they are even made!

With focus on the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase satisfaction, User journey marketing can prove to be a game changer for businesses looking to increase conversions, build brand loyalty, and maximise their ROI.

Benefits of User Journey Marketing

One of the main benefits of user journey marketing is that it offers a more holistic view of the customer experience. Some of the top benefits of user journey marketing:

  1. 1. Increases conversions: Personalising the experience by user persona and their stage of journey, can help to reduce friction and encourage customers to make a purchase leading to higher sales.
  2. 2. Improves repeat business and customer retention, with consistent and engaging experience creating a deeper emotional connection to continue doing business.
  3. 3. Reduces acquisition costs: By improving customer retention and increasing brand loyalty. Also, repeat customers require less marketing spend to convert.
  4. 4. Increases lifetime value: With stronger relationships, Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others, which can lead to increased revenue over time.
  5. 5. Improves efficiency: By analysing data throughout the customer journey, we can identify lower converting audience segments or over exposure of messages and optimise media spends accordingly.

Overall, user journey marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing that can help build stronger relationships with customers, increase retention and brand loyalty, thereby improving conversions, revenue and profitability.

Where to Begin

It all starts with defining your ideal customer, mapping out their journey across various touchpoints, layering personalised experiences at each stage, and measuring the results and progressively improving the whole journey.

  1. 1. Creating Personas: The first step in initiating user journey marketing is to define our ideal customer persona, their demo profile, interests, motivations, and pain points. This can be done by analysing our existing customer base and with market research specifically who benefit from our product (aka Product Market FIt).
  2. 2. Defining the stages: Next is to map out our customers journey throughout the Path2Purchase. This involves- defining various user journey stages and understanding our customers’ intent states and pain points at each stage.
  3. 3. Creating Content for each stage: We then use this information to create messaging and experiences personalised for a given persona and for each stage. from initial awareness to final purchase and beyond. Must also consider the conducive format (video, ads, search, native), and the channels where it will be distributed.
  4. 4. Channel Orchestration: Then we map out touchpoints that customers would interact with our brand including website visits, social media engagement, email communications, and customer service channel across initial stages of awareness to final stage of purchase (and beyond).
  5. 5. Analyse & optimise customer experience: identify areas for improvement by validating the customer experience in cohorts of customers’ user journey stage. Is the experience consistent with expected, or is there friction that is stalling the movement to the next stage? We use these insights to optimise the journey with targeted messaging and personalised site navigation.
  6. 6. Rinse & repeat: Continuously monitor customer data and feedback to improve the overall user journey marketing strategy. Businesses should measure success as per KPIs aligned with business objectives such as conversion rate, or customer retention rate, Lifetime Value or Customer Acquisition Cost. and make adjustments in marketing strategies as needed. Also stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices to ensure that our marketing efforts remain effective..

By following these steps, we can create a successful user journey marketing strategy that will enable us in building relationships with our consumers and driving conversions.

Challenges of User Journey Marketing

One of the biggest challenges of user journey marketing is mapping the customer journey and creating a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints. This requires a deep understanding of the customer and their interaction with the brand on different platforms with a closed feedback loop, which can be a complex process, especially for businesses with a large customer base or those that operate in multiple markets.

Another big challenge is data integration. We need data from multiple sources, including website analytics, social media, email marketing, and customer relationship management systems. to understand customer behaviour and preferences.

Also, with changing customer needs and preferences over time, businesses need to continuously monitor and adjust their user journey marketing strategy to remain effective.

Finally, Implementing a user journey marketing strategy can require significant time and resources, which may be a challenge for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets.

Final Summary
To summarise, user journey marketing is a customer-centric approach that can benefit businesses by providing a more personalised experience for their target audience, resulting in higher conversions, increased customer loyalty, lower acquisition costs, and improved efficiency. While mapping out the entire customer journey and integrating data from multiple sources can be difficult, user journey marketing provides a holistic view of the customer experience that can help build stronger relationships with customers. It is important to note that user journey marketing and performance marketing are two distinct approaches to digital marketing, each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, depending on the goals and target audience, a successful marketing strategy will likely incorporate elements of both.

End of Third-Party Cookies: What It Means for Digital Marketing

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End of Third-Party Cookies: What It Means for Digital Marketing

Posted on by Gaurav Gupta

Introduction

The online world is about to undergo a significant change as third-party cookies get phased out. Cookies are pieces of code that collect user behaviour information across the internet and have been essential to digital advertising for over a decade. However, with increasing concern over data privacy and security, some web browsers have blocked out third-party cookies by default and Google has announced plans to phase them out entirely.

The end of third-party cookies will have far-reaching implications for the advertising industry, making it crucial to adapt to new alternatives to collect user data for effective targeting and campaign optimisation. Those who fall behind will risk losing data of their potential customers, while their competitors will gain a fast mover’s advantage to build their own pool of audience cordoned off to the outside world

The History of Third-Party Cookies Deprecation

The use of third-party cookies became widespread in the early days of the internet as a way to track user behaviour and serve them targeted ads. The concern over deprecation of third-party cookies began sometime in 2019 when Google announced phasing out third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. This was in response to growing concerns of privacy and the fact that major tech companies such as Apple and Mozilla began to take action to limit their use. In 2017, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari to limit the use of third-party cookies. Mozilla followed suit with its own tracking protection features in Firefox in 2018. Then in 2020, Google, which dominated the browser market, first announced its plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022; which has now been delayed to the end of 2024. This has sparked discussions about alternative tracking methods and the future of digital advertising.

Implications of the End of Third-Party Cookies

The end of third-party cookies has significant implications for digital marketers. It will affect businesses of all sizes, including marketers, advertisers, and publishers. Industries that rely heavily on targeted advertising, such as e-commerce, will be more impacted than industries that focus on brand awareness. These cookies allow advertisers to serve the users with targeted ads and optimise for conversion on ad platforms like Google & Meta. With the loss of third-party cookies, advertisers will have less information about users’ online behaviour to target and optimise for conversion. This will result in an inevitable lower conversion and high costs.

Alternatives of 3P cookies

The limitations on tracking and retargeting resulting from the end of third-party cookies have forced digital marketers to explore alternatives. Such as

Contextual targeting: This involves serving ads based on the content of the webpage rather than the user’s browsing history.

Cohort-based targeting: This method groups users based on their common interests or behaviors, rather than tracking individual user behavior.

AI- based Probabilistic targeting: This involves using machine learning algorithms to analyze user data and make predictions about their behavior and preferences.

Privacy-first data sharing:Companies working together to create privacy-focused data sharing agreements that allow for more targeted advertising without compromising user privacy.

First-party datawhere companies can collect and use their own first-party data to understand their customers and target ads based on that data. This is the most reliable and also the most scalable alternative that industry is rapidly adopting.

Recommended alternative

We recommend First-party data as the preferred alternative as its based on privacy-first framework of First-party cookies (these aren’t going away) that’s based on users’ consent on tracking information such as website behaviour, purchase history, and user preferences and login information directly from consumers; and therefore its considerably more reliable unlike third-party data, which is obtained from external sources, that is use for interest based audience segments on Meta and Google and even used forLookalike targeting.

Challenges in Adopting a First-Party Data Approach
One big challenge is the need for significant investment in data collection & management platform, which is both capital and tech intensive. Another big challenge is that it requires a deep understanding of user behaviour and preferences, which can be challenging to obtain. Finally, first-party data is subject to data privacy regulations, which can be complex and challenging to navigate.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the end of third-party cookies has significant implications for digital marketers. However, by adopting new strategies for collecting and utilising data effectively, marketers can continue to serve relevant ads and create personalised experiences for users. The rise of first-party data provides an excellent opportunity for marketers to improve targeting, increase engagement, and optimise campaigns. By building a first-party data strategy and working with data platforms like CDPs, marketers can stay ahead of the curve and prepare for a world without third-party cookies.