As 2022 comes to a close, ‘tis the season to reflect on the year. This year, we’ve experienced rapid market changes, demanding marketing teams to re-evaluate strategies, maximize the value of their current tech stacks and investments, and discover new ways to improve their customer experience.  

In this article, we’ll reflect on 5 marketing lessons we’ve learned throughout 2022, so we can apply them and hit the ground running in 2023. 

Lesson #1: Siloed Data Limits Your Marketing Potential

Access to data has continued to be a growing challenge for marketers. Without access to clean data, or a unified view of your customers, campaigns, or spending, you can’t automate time-consuming processes, segment audiences, provide personalized experiences, or make informed, data-driven decisions.   

Automating tedious processes not only simplifies your team’s day-to-day but also opens your team up to work on more fulfilling, value-added initiatives. With that in mind, it pays to take the time to establish a strong data infrastructure. Fortunately, there are tools and resources that can help unify data sources and power consistent cross-channel experiences. We have reviewed: 

• How customer data platforms (CDPs) can help establish a single view of your customers without being reliant on developers or IT teams  
• How having access to better data and analytics can take the guesswork out of email design 
• Innovative solutions Levsters have implemented that strengthened data infrastructure and reduced internal complexities 
  

Lesson #2: Data is a Growing Commodity Being Privatized

As we are on this topic of data, in 2022, many marketers experienced data collection challenges. In late 2021, we reported on Apple’s launch of Mail Privacy Protection and how it gives Apple Mail users an option to hide their IP address to protect their mail activity. Due to this change, marketers can’t get an accurate view of their open rates or viewing activity for opted-in users. As a result, many of our own clients are now having to pay attention to additional signals to indicate movement down the funnel such as clicks, conversions, unsubscribes, and complaints. 

Web traffic is also becoming more privatized. Apple already has blocked third-party cookies tracking and Google is following their lead in 2023 by phasing out cross-site tracking in Google Chrome. What this means is that cookies from your website can’t track site visitors outside of your website. This could lead to not having enough data to deliver things like personalized ads to different websites.  

‍
With growing customer concerns about privacy, we should expect tighter restrictions surrounding data collection in the future. As a result, it’s critical to begin strengthening your zero and first-party data collection strategy. As mentioned in our 2022 holiday planning guide, establishing loyalty programs or other direct communication channels is an exceptional way to collect the data you need to ensure your customer experiences are frictionless, personalized, and memorable.  

Lesson #3: The Marketing Landscape Can Change Rapidly, and You Need a Plan to Address It

In our fast-paced digital world, the marketing landscape can change at the drop of a dime. This is best reflected in the recent changes to Twitter’s leadership. Within the last month, we’ve seen drastic changes to the social media advertising industry due to Elon Musk buying out Twitter for $44B. His helm, in many ways, has been controversial because of rapid, and in some perspectives, unwise changes to the platform.   

One major change occurred with the blue checkmark system, which historically was used to verify popular brands, celebrities, and influencers. In early November, Twitter launched changes to the program, which allowed any user to pay $8 a month to get their own blue checkmark by their name. Unsurprisingly, some users paid this fee and began to impersonate large corporations and influential people on the platform, resulting in many of these companies losing billions of dollars. As a result, 50 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers ceased their ad spending on the platform, at least temporarily.   

At the same time, Twitter initiated massive layoffs across the organization globally. Subsequently, many advertisers have reported that they’ve lost contact with Twitter's internal ad team, making it difficult to adjust their ad spending even if they wanted to.  

In uncertain times like these, it’s critical to have internal processes in place that empowers you to act swiftly. If your team prioritizes advertising on Twitter, it’s critical to have real-time ad reporting that flags declining results. Also, you want to have contingency plans in place, so you can adjust spending across your advertising platforms if necessary.   

Going into 2023, focus on crafting contingency plans that address potential failure points within your marketing strategy. One way you can start building contingencies is by ensuring your MarTech stack enables you to pivot at scale when necessary.  

Lesson #4: Maximize the Value of Your Current MarTech Stack

Considering the increase in layoffs nationwide across the last couple of months, we imagine the market may continue to face resource constraints throughout the rest of the year and going into 2023.  These constraints could lead to decreases in budgets, and force marketing teams to do more with less. For that reason, we recommend trying to maximize the value you are currently getting out of your current martech stack. We’d imagine there are features in your marketing suite that you may not realize are available. Or perhaps there are processes you wish you’d have time to improve. 

According to Salesforce’s 2022 State of Marketing Report, 72% of marketers say meeting customer expectations is more difficult than a year ago, and a lot of this is due to customers’ increasing digital engagement across channels. As the scope of your omnichannel strategy increases, it’s important to think about how you can automate tedious tasks, utilize integrations to provide personalized experiences across channels and implement a CDP (Customer Data Platform) to centralize customer data. Ensuring your platforms and processes work together can empower your team to provide customer experiences that aren’t possible manually.  

You may be asking yourself, “How do I build a strong foundation for my internal marketing processes when I am scraping by day-to-day?” Fortunately, maximizing value doesn’t have to mean more work for you. 

Lesson #5: Strong Partnerships Allow You to Accomplish Your Goals While Remaining Nimble

Establishing strong marketing partnerships can enable you to remain nimble, excel in your day-to-day activities, and get the most out of your martech. Here at Lev, we will take the time to get to know you, your team, and your organization, so we can not only deliver what you ask for but also what you need. 

Our team, with a winning combination of next-level marketing strategies and deep technical expertise, can help you connect with your customers at the right place and time, continuously evolve and optimize your marketing across channels, develop scalable marketing strategies, and adhere to best practices to provide a best-in-class customer experience.   

Contact us to discover how we can help you optimize internal processes, so you can begin 2023 renewed and primed to accomplish your goals!