Customer first marketing — the biggest shift away from huge ad budgets, loud marketing, and the endless search for going viral.

The customer exists in a segment of one, their world is carefully curated to through their choices and products. This is seen through the made to them order vitamins, their cars know how the like things down to the smallest details. Most of their life is created by them, how they like it. Personalization is no longer an additional sale, it’s necessary.

Specifically, This customer of one defies standard marketing, which means marketing is still changing.

Marketing is rooted in reaching the masses aka grow viral, which creates more + wider selection of consumers to buy your product, services or ideas. This idea rest heavily on your wider selection already knowing you, trusting you and ready to buy from you. Which is why every other business owner is using the same method to cut through the noise (thus making more noise).

Marketing that reaches the mass of people

Variety ways this content is used and seen across multiple mediums:

1. Trending audios in short video clips used on instagram or Tik Tok. This adoption of audios creates a feed of sameness, which bores the consumer.
2. The push to be everywhere (also see: Ominprescence) without the realization that the message is getting watered down because the consumer is seeing the same content on multiple places.
3. The idea that you must make more, have the consumer consume more and just keep pushing on.

All of this is good, expect a basic human principle comes into play. Humans are either curious or annoyed through new information. Curiosity will lead to exploration, while annoyance will be tuned out.

If it is not relevant or provide value to the consumer, the chances of getting them to buy is harder.

The goal in all marketing is to reach the right consumers with the right messaging.

With the rise of screen time, and the average person spending more than 5 hours on their phone daily. Personalization must be front of mind with the creation of marketing content and ads. When it comes to ad creation, the idea is to be creating more highly segmented ads to feel more personalize than traditional methods.

Say Goodbye to targeting the 5 big names in your space, and sending an ad to their people. Data and human principles are changing inside marketing.

Biggest Change coming in 2022

In 2022, the three biggest changes that I see coming are

1. Permission to collect + use the data as they are scrolling the web. Allowing the site to collect the virutal cookies to know what the consumer is doing and how often they are is a violation of their privacy in their own terms. Retargeting is a powerful tool through cookies, however the basic consumer doesn’t understand how it’s collecting the information and what information it is collecting. You are already seeing it with the talk about being followed, phones listening, etc.
   
   
   What needs to change: Asking the customer when they want to be followed and how they want to be followed.
   
   Reframing this idea would come with the idea of customer loyalty through purchase instead of just blanket listening. This could be seen by sites asking for permission before collecting cookies, continued explanation on the social sites displaying the ads + sites collecting cookies on what and how they are used, and just letting the customer chose.
   
   Ad free experiences allow the customer to feel seen and heard, which leads the creativity to more organic ways of research customer than just pay to play with these huge ad budgets.
   

2. Curation to the highest degree that empowers the customer. Allowing the consumer to customize their ad experience and even content experience.
   
   How powerful would it feel to be able to truly curate their instagram feed beyond just who they are following.
   
   Transferring this into the ad space, the customer could request what they want to be shown ads based on their interest
   
   Example: If you are trying to grow your family, you may not have all the information on what baby brands are the best. Can you imagine just being able to go into your settings and say “show me educational information on baby brands + allow me to see more ads on baby brands”
   
   
   

3. The continued power of market research + utilizing customers as the real product developers. In Why She Buys by Bridget Brennan, Swiffer allows the customer to build the next evolutions of their products. Swiffers were designed to clean the floors of the customers houses. When they visited the customers, what they found was this system could be used in other ways than just the floor. This idea lead to more of their dusting products.
   
   Your customers are using your product daily. These group of loyalized people are your best testers and product developers. Creating the opportunity for feedback is so key with your growing customer base. The customer is an expert, allow them to do the research
   
   
   As a brands you must lean into encouraging your customers to fill out the surveys and leaving honest reviews.

The Future of Marketing

Marketing is always changing, however one rule still stands. You can never go wrong when you are constantly putting the needs of the customer first and asking their opinion.

Tell me in the comments below — what are some trends you see coming into marketing?