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PHOTO: William Warby | spray out

We have all gone through a lot of changes in the past 18 months. People question important principles of life – their schooling, how and where they work, what they spend their free time with, where they live and much more. Questions have also arisen from a business perspective as brands change along with consumers. Brands ask what works and what doesn’t, what is most important to their customers and what is important to their employees.

To paraphrase the successful inventor, businessman, physicist and perhaps one of the greatest problem solvers in the world, Lord Kelvin, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” How can measurement help provide answers to the above questions for To give brands? I see three key measurement-centric topics that will drive the martech forward in 2022.

1. Overall marketing: ROMI becomes the top-of-mind

Marketing managers feel under constant pressure to prove the value of marketing, but the pressure is now even stronger. As marketing responsibility rises and marketing budgets decline, measuring marketing impact has never been more important. To effectively measure the effectiveness of marketing – techniques like attribution, optimization and AI- and ML-based reinforcement and agile learning will be of greatest interest to marketing leaders and their teams in 2022. These techniques are used with the customer’s voice (NPS, CAC, CLV etc) and organizational changes (polls, sentiment, education, training etc) to build a brand’s complete marketing measurement toolkit. This will allow brands to measure the full return on marketing investment (ROMI) more effectively.

Related article: The Challenges of Measuring Marketing ROI

2. Consumer Confidence: First-party data underscores a new exchange of values

With the imminent end of the third-party cookie, marketers will not only pursue their first-party data strategy more holistically, but also develop new methods to initiate and create better exchanges with consumers. Brands need to develop, test, and measure new and innovative ways to get consumers to forego this valuable first-party customer data. Marketers will help brands develop these unique and creative strategies to provide demonstrable value and encourage customers to engage in a two-way dialogue and opt for digital data capture.

Brands previously relied on third-party cookie techniques to collect the data that underlies so much marketing and loyalty efforts. This exchange of values ​​between the brand and the consumer, be it the brand offering discounts, waivers, incentive programs or other rewards, will pave the way for a new kind of brand and consumer interaction that relies more on brand transparency and authenticity. Building consumer trust will require significant progress in 2022 as brands prepare for the third-party cookie to disappear in 2023.

Related article: The Fall of the Cookie and the Rise of First-Party Data

3. The influence of the employee on the customer: EX informs and influences CX

As we know, an exceptional employee experience is inextricably linked with a seamless, smooth customer experience. As the major realignment of 2021 progresses, in 2022 companies will emphasize not just recruiting and retaining employees, but developing, tracking, and measuring employee onboarding, education, development, and compensation. This is done in order not only to retain top talent, but also to positively influence the downstream customer experience. Brands know that it is difficult to please and even excite end customers when their own frontline people are not efficient, empowered, and enthusiastic about their work. Marketing organizations will demand that the customer experience improve in 2022 and other departments will join in to make this a reality.

As marketers become more data driven, we will no doubt find that measurement comes to the fore. In 2022, marketers will measure the effectiveness of their programs, how well they are converting and collecting valuable first-party data, and how their employees are impacting the end customer experience. It will be fun to watch and perhaps be very noticeable who makes significant changes in these three areas and continues with the status quo.

Jonathan Moran covers the global product marketing activities at SAS, with an emphasis on customer experiences and marketing technologies. Prior to SAS, Jon gained over 20 years of marketing and analytics industry experience at both Earnix and Teradata Corporation in pre-sales, consulting and marketing roles.