That’s The Way The Cookie Crumbles!

Marketing trends come and go, constantly evolving as brands attempt to leverage the newest technologies and respond to shifts in the marketplace and in consumer behaviors. The general mindset of adapting to new things is happening much faster these days. As we continue to move forward, it will be much more difficult to navigate which marketing trends to focus on and which to take a pass on.

There’s so much going on in the market right now that it’s tough to nail down the best trends. As marketers and advertisers, I think we can agree that marketing after Covid has brought about many new levels of creativity. In the next year or so, it will be all about creating an effective brand, a compelling story, and measuring the success of that story. It’s no longer enough to create a brand and expect it to sell itself. Those days are long gone, and consumers are not responding to this type of marketing as much as they did in the past. Brand loyalty needs to be built on a much more personal and engaging level.

Effective marketing tactics in the past have revolved around using the right platforms for promotion, creating ads that targeted specific market audiences or demographics through market research and impression information provided by the mediums utilized. 3rd-party tracking cookies have also long been a useful but imperfect way to target online ads and enable other marketing strategies. With the clock ticking on their demise, marketing leaders know that they need to make a move, but only the slightest idea of where they need to go.

But this kind of turmoil can be a good thing. Anytime you’re forced to optimize a strategy, you can’t help but to try to make it better. Cookies or no cookies, our job is to find and to engage with specific audiences. We will now need to gather first-party data beginning with gaining the consumer’s trust. Identifying your audience means engaging with them on a personal level and asking them to identify themselves. You want to invite your customers to share personal information and feel confident in using your service on every one of their devices. After you have that, it doesn’t matter if they access your brand through their smartphone, tablet, or laptop, you’re able to welcome them anytime and communicate with them on a more personal level. Once you’ve identified your consumers, you can collect individual information, build customer profiles and reach out to them with the information that they want from you and is relevant to them.

There will always be a way to track and serve relevant advertising. However, we all need to prepare for the extinction of the cookie now, while we still have time. We can find a way to better appeal to our audiences through a more natural, people-based approach. We may even discover what attracts people to your brands and what can make them a more loyal customer in the process.