Discover how to include contextual insight in the research and planning phase of your campaign development. Read our guide, which highlights multiple context insights or trends in detail.

Learn how to:

• Measure content engagement over time
• Work with trending content
• Apply insights about trends and measurement to your campaign

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After being in and out of lockdown during the pandemic, it’s fair to say that consumers are craving interaction. For brands, it’s important to capitalise on this - when the majority of correspondence has been through technology - and deliver those personalised experiences that will help meet their needs.

From how to build a digital foundation to delivering personal experiences at scale, discover why personalisation matters.

Download this guide to learn:

• How to map your customer journey
• What data to track and how to measure success
• The main personalisation challenges facing brands

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TikTok has launched a pilot programme in the US to help job seekers create and send 'video resumes' to potential employers as it looks to expand the platform into recruitment.

The new service, dubbed 'TikTok Resumes', already has a selection of job openings from brands such as WWE, Shopify and Target.

At a time when tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are scrambling to be more like the video-sharing app, TikTok itself is aiming to be more like LinkedIn, with the company suggesting that there has been a rise in "career and job-related creative content" on its platform over the past year and that this could be used as a "channel for recruitment".

As an example, TikTok user and Berkeley graduate 'Christian' has created a short video resume with graphics and background images to showcase his skills with Adobe and Google Dialogflow and his experience working with brands, such as flight operator KLM.

Users can pursue job listings via the app or the website's TikTok discovery page, with US job openings available till 31 July.

"TikTok Resumes is officially open and accepting TikTok video resumes," said Nick Tran, global head of marketing at TikTok. "We're humbled to be able to partner with some of the world's most admired and emerging brands as we pilot a new way for job seekers to showcase their experiences and skill sets in creative and authentic ways."

Tran added that TikTok is hoping to "reimagine recruitment and job discovery", and the social media platform has already made a start on that ambition with the hashtag 'CareerTok' which pools together resume examples, career advice and interview tutorials.

According to the Pew Research Centre, 48% of 18 to 29-year-olds in the US have reported having a TikTok account, compared to just 30% who say they have a LinkedIn profile.

Salesforce has launched a new platform that combines its marketing, commerce and digital services into one single package.

Called Digital 360, the platform claims it will give businesses the ability to operate at peak levels every single day.

With the continuing impact of the coronavirus pandemic being felt around the world, Salesforce's Digital 360 platform aims to help make digital transformation faster and easier. It combines Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud with access to the firm's broad partner ecosystem.

There are also new products within Digital 360, such as a customer data platform called Customer 360 Audiences, a payment solution powered by Stripe called Commerce Cloud Payments, and Experience Cloud which enables fast CRM-powered digital experiences.

"Every company has gone digital overnight because of the pandemic," said Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM of Digital at Salesforce. "With Digital 360, we're delivering the full power of Salesforce tailored to digital leaders - our products, ecosystem, learning and expert services - enabling them to move with the speed, agility and scale they need to operate at Black Friday levels every single day."

Digital revenue in 2020 grew by 71% compared to the previous year, according to Salesforce's Q2 Shopping Index. As such, the cloud giant suggests that the key to success, in any industry, is scalable, data-driven solutions that personalise customer experiences, whether that be from marketing emails and timely advertising to online shopping and in store experiences.

The service has already seen success, with companies such as Sonos using it during the pandemic to sell directly to its partners.

"Our collaboration with Salesforce has supported Sonos' ability to scale and accommodate a massive influx in business to our e-commerce site as we focus on selling directly to our customers," said Lindsay Whitworth, director global direct-to-consumer at Sonos.

"As a result, we've been able to deliver relevant, personalised engagement at scale using campaigns and data-driven insights."

Tools for marketing and creative processes often don’t function the way they should. This might be because they’re numerous and disconnected, used across teams in incoherent ways, or siloed with limited use. This makes quality and consistency difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to maintain.

This whitepaper explores the possibilities and methods for achieving better creative and marketing consistency by employing solid governance policies, master data practices, and a content hub.

Download it now to discover how to create centralised workspaces that bring together creative assets, product data, analytics, and workflows.

Your customers expect memorable moments at every brand touchpoint. And when you have websites, social pages, blogs, and mobile content to consider, it can feel impossible to deliver everything with quality and speed.

Stitching together the systems, data and processes needed to manage content creation and delivery at scale across channels is a daunting task. And with today’s content personalisation mandate layered on top of this work-stream, the daunting task becomes a full-blown crisis.

This whitepaper explores how a content hub built on a new class of systems and processes is able to bring about a marketing transformation, helping to supercharge your marketing operations.

Design enables businesses to create quality customer experiences that build brand loyalty, yet hasn’t always been considered a business priority, with design leaders struggling to educate stakeholders of the business value. However, even with the increased prioritisation of design, teams are struggling to keep up, reporting a lack of talent and tools needed to compete.

This whitepaper presents findings of a maturity assessment survey of 385 design professionals in an effort to evaluate design systems - the principles, templates, components, processes, tools, and people that guide an organisation's design efforts.

Download it now to discover how and why taking the risk on design-investment creates business benefits for your organisation.

Customer experience (CX) is mission-critical as consumers demand tailored, engaging brand interactions. Since investing in CX can triple your return and increase revenue by 19%, market-leading companies are using data to deliver rich, relevant experiences through personalisation – presenting custom content that resonates with their audience.

But delivering personalisation is difficult. Many organisations simply don’t have the technology nor the capabilities to get started.

This whitepaper explores how to get started with CX personalisation, setting out three key ways to achieve success quickly and with low costs.

The content management landscape is changing. To support the modern enterprise in its quest to meet evolving customer expectations, technology is shifting away from on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure, both of which are outdated and unable to deliver the modern customer experience, towards cloud-native infrastructure which holds agility and flexibility at its core.

The driving force behind this shift is that customers in the present day are demanding an enhanced experience along their e-commerce journeys, even though this may appear at odds with the direction of data protection legislation. Essentially, consumers want their shops to recognise them without the shop in question infringing far into the territory of personal information. At its best, therefore, enhancements should be subtle yet effective, a difficult balance to achieve.

Unfortunately, many organisations are struggling to quickly and efficiently deliver enhanced content experiences as, while 64% report to having a CMS in place, only 31% can publish content to multiple channels without having to laboriously create each piece of content separately. This bottleneck can slow the entire content delivery process, making it difficult for businesses to deliver the contextualised experiences their customers have grown accustomed to.

Fortunately, technology has responded to pick up the slack. Organisations are turning to modern, cloud-native content management software powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to provide both IT personnel and marketers the foundation necessary to deliver upon evolving customer expectations.

Personalisation

The role of AI within the enterprise continues to grow, with CIOs on a constant lookout for new ways to use developing technology to gain an edge over their competitors. When it comes to content processes, the intervention of AI technology is nowhere more apparent than in its ability to impact data and help deliver the level of personalisation that customers expect. Because of this AI is integral to the cloud-native CMS pitch, as it’s essential to delivering the most relevant experiences to an audience.

Personalisation can come in many forms. Relevant advertisements, suggested items, and message pop-ups, all driven by data, comprise the types of targeted advertisements sure to enhance the customer experience.

Machine learning specifically can be used to capture data over a period of time and translate that data to understand how audiences interact with the content present on a website. That information can then be used to automatically deliver personalised experiences to future visitors based on what it believes that person wants to see. Advertisements and so forth can then be tailored to each individual customer, resulting in more relevant content that receives greater rates of engagement.

Faster content creation

One of the main positives of AI in any use case is in its ability to shoulder tasks, complete these tasks efficiently and quickly, and simultaneously liberate parts of the human workforce to focus on more valuable initiatives; and when it comes to content management there’s no exception to the rule.

Even today the regular content management process involves lots of manual tasks that, given the right technology, could be automated. However, a cloud-native CMS is able to offer automatic tagging to ensure employees can focus on the creative elements of their job rather than, for example, spending work-hours sourcing and modifying photos and videos. Further, AI can make reusing content simple through its ability to adapt text parameters to fit various screens, allowing authored content to be promoted across multiple channels and devices.

A cloud-native CMS smooths out the wrinkles in the content delivery process. The time saved through automation is, of course, useful and enables employees to focus on the tasks that really add value, but the real reward here is the enhanced customer experience the cloud-native CMS is able to deliver to each content channel in real time.

Optimisation

In saturated markets where each sliver of space is valuable, optimisation can be the key differentiator between an organisation remaining competitive or sinking to murky depths. Optimisation can be achieved through thorough testing in order to identify what works and what doesn’t. Content teams should compare different variables, combining different types of content, navigation, design and so on, and then conduct A/B testing to understand how those changes perform. The best performers can then be used going forwards.

However, varying content and conducting systematic testing uses up valuable resources and time. Often A/B testing is seen as a luxury that organisations can't afford, meaning content isn’t tested, performance suffers, and customers are liable to flock elsewhere.

A cloud-native CMS can help developers create different testing variations of navigations, interactions, and so on, by running A/B tests automatically. Similar to the ability to allow for faster content creation, a cloud-native CMS permits more efficient testing to free developers to focus on other projects that add more value to the organisation, with perhaps the more potent benefit being that content is optimised to serve each user, enhancing the all-important customer experience.

Although GDPR’s second birthday is rapidly approaching, the dust is yet to firmly settle around its implementation. Many questions and concerns remain unanswered, destabilising a data landscape that modern industries must navigate with caution.

This rings true with few professions greater than email marketers, with the email marketing campaigns they conduct experiencing the largest cause of complaints to data protection authorities across Europe since GDPR’s introduction in May 2018, alongside telemarketing and the use of video surveillance.

That’s because GDPR alters how organisations are able to use data, particularly the third-party data email marketers use to target existing and potential customers. For whichever reason – be it misunderstanding the legislation, or being unable to deliver personalised experiences whilst complying – over 100 GDPR-related fines have been distributed, stemming from around 60,000 complaints received by the European Commission. And perhaps nothing highlights how large a hurdle GDPR can be than the ICO’s decision to relax GDPR enforcement during the coronavirus economic downturn.

To avoid debilitating fines, it’s vital for businesses to follow established best-practices principles concerning the use of marketing and data. However, that's easier said than done.

The main point of concern is customer consent. GDPR holds organisations accountable for the data they hold and use, requiring them to have a strong reason for touching data, referred to as ‘legitimate interest’ – such as fraud prevention or the fulfillment of a legal contract. Such data processing has to be necessary to the act of achieving this purpose, provided that the rights of the individual whose data is being processed aren't infringed upon.

There are a number of ways to meet the legitimate interest clause, though its often the case that marketers rely on an individual giving their explicit and informed consent. Previously, many companies relied on tiny and obscure check-boxes that are ticked by default in order to obtain 'consent' from customers but, under GDPR, companies must explain in clear, concise wording exactly why customers' data is being gathered and how it will be used.

Many marketing departments are concerned that, if customers are given the choice about whether or not they want to be sent newsletters and other forms of marketing materials, they will refuse it. However, Skip Fidura, Chair of the Responsible Marketing Committee at the Digital Marketing Association, believes that GDPR actually offers an opportunity for marketers to use GDPR to their advantage.

We spoke to him to find out some of his top tips for email marketers who want to survive GDPR.

1) Don't panic!

The biggest thing that digital marketers need to remember, Fidura says, is that GDPR is not the apocalyptic cataclysm that many are making it out to be. If marketers have been doing their jobs properly, he argues, the laws should have a minimal impact on how marketers do business.

"There's really nothing in the GDPR that email marketers haven't been talking about and doing as best practice for years. Being open, honest and transparent when it comes to getting consent - you can use the GDPR language, but it all boils down to being open, honest and transparent," Fidura explains.

2) Don't re-permission your lists, refine them

A common response to GDPR from many marketing departments has been to try and re-obtain consent from their entire marketing list for life-long messaging, but according to Fidura, this is an unnecessary effort. "The myth when GDPR first came out," he notes, "was that consent is the only way we can market and therefore, because I don't have GDPR-level consent, I have to go get GDPR-level consent."

In reality, he continues, what brands have done is to take a step back and examine their data, working out how much of their lists they can continue to market to under GDPR's 'legitimate interests' provisos, which customers they need to approach to ask for new permissions, and which customers should be culled from their lists entirely.

3) Follow best practice

This dovetails neatly with another of Fidura's top tips, which is to make a point of following best practice - i.e. reducing email lists when some recipients haven't engaged for a defined period of time - no matter how unpalatable it may seem.

"[Marketers] know they should be culling people off lists, but when you go to the finance people and say 'I've just cut 25% off our email list', the finance people go 'what are you, crazy?'," he says. "So actually, I think in some cases, marketers have been able to use GDPR to do what they know they should have been doing all along."

4) Audit your data regularly

Of course, you can't cut dead weight from your email lists if you don't know that it's there. Fidura advises that companies conduct regular audits of their data stores to ensure that they know exactly what state their lists are in.

"The problem with data is data has a shelf-life, and just like a piece of fish that's gone off, if you let it sit too long, it's gonna stink," he states. Companies need to be aware of how long data is going to be relevant for when they collect it, and should regularly audit it based on the inflow of data and how many people are accessing and modifying it.

5) Don't forget about ongoing compliance

Many organisations went into a mad scramble to get ready for GDPR last year, but that doesn't mean that the work to get compliant is done. As Fidura points out, GDPR is far from a one-time deal. While initially complying with the regulations is important, ensuring that you continue to uphold those standards is actually more critical in the long run. The further we get from May 2018, the more relaxed companies are going to get, and it won't be long before "they're going to buy some new system and forget that they've got to now plug that into their GDPR compliance".

"What they need to think about going forwards is, they need to remember the steps they went through to get to their GDPR compliance; the data audit that they did," Fidura says. "Every time they bring a new channel, tool or system online, they need to think about what the potential impact of that is to the consumer. If necessary, they need to do a privacy impact assessment and they need to document all that stuff, because [GDPR implementation] is not the end; it's the end of beginning. GDPR doesn't go away."

6) Build customer trust

GDPR might be scary for marketers, but in reality, it offers companies an opportunity to build a deeper, more trusting relationship with their customers. According to research by the Digital Marketing Association, 62% of consumers are more willing to share their data if they have GDPR explained to them, and more than 85% want greater control and transparency regarding how their data is used and collected.

"We know that consumers get to be more comfortable about giving up data when they know how the data's going to be used; that's just human nature," Fidura says. "I think the opportunity for all marketers is to start talking about GDPR, start telling people about what's in the GDPR, what their rights are, how the business is implementing that, so that they start to rebuild trust. And then, of course, they have to live up to that."

7) Be honest about what data you need

It's not just customers that marketers need to be honest with around GDPR; according to Fidura, they also have to be honest with themselves. As part of the data audits mentioned above, marketing professionals need to take a step back and examine what data they absolutely need to have, and what data they're gathering for the sake of it.

"The example I always use is this: we have DotMailer-branded socks. In theory, to know how many socks to buy, we should ask people their shoe size. As an email marketing company, do we really have a need for their shoe size?", Fidura notes. "No - because we're probably going to buy a bunch of large, a bunch of mediums and a bunch of smalls anyway."

8) Be accountable

One of the fundamental tenets of GDPR is making companies accountable to the people whose data they hold, but Fidura says that this is a standard which companies should be holding themselves to regardless, in the service of rebuilding customer trust.

"Whatever you do, if something goes wrong and you violate that trust, be accountable for it. Hold up your hand and say 'you know what, we screwed up'," he says. "Too often, corporations don't want to say anything until they know all the facts, but by then, they've lost the story."

9) Don't let lawyers write your privacy policies

For marketers, GDPR isn't simply about getting customers to check a box indicating that they're happy to receive your emails; one of the stipulations is that you must give them a specific set of details about how you're using that information. Similar to the oft-ignored terms and conditions agreements for software, this is often represented by a wall of dense legal text, but it doesn't have to be.

"Don't let your lawyer or compliance team write your privacy policy," advises DMA managing director Rachel Aldighieri. "Work with them and the creative teams and your communications teams to write that." She says that privacy policies can be engaging and attractive when done well, citing examples from EasyJet, the BBC and more.

This article was originally published in May 2018, and has since been updated to include additional figures.

Facebook is redesigning Pages for small businesses in an attempt to revitalise an aspect of its platform that has become strangled with oversaturation and algorithmic tweaks to the news feed.

Pages will increasingly serve as platforms for consumers to meaningfully interact with small businesses, by making reservations or booking appointments for example, against serving merely as marketing tools which organisations use to compete for news feed exposure.

As part of the wave of changes, user recommendations will be given more prominence, and ticketed events will allow organisers to sell tickets directly from Facebook Events. The tech giant's job application tool is also being expanded worldwide to help businesses more effectively advertise for employees.

"Local communities are built, grown and sustained by people," said Facebook's vice president of local Alex Himel. "People like your neighbors, your friends and your favorite local business owners. On Facebook, there are more than 80 million small businesses using our free business tools."

Facebook's recently-rolled out Stories feature, akin to that offered by Instagram, will be expanded to businesses so Page-owners can post their own Snapchat-like update for their users and engage with customers.

Also introduced as part of the revamp are a host of 'action buttons' that can allow Facebook users to perform actions beyond just sending a message - such as booking a service with the business.

"These improvements are a small part of our commitment to help businesses connect with customers," the company added on its Facebook Business site. "We'll continue to work on new ways to make these connections easier and more valuable to help all businesses grow."

Revitalising pages for small businesses is a much-needed endeavour given the combination of oversaturation, and changes to Facebook's news feed earlier this year that prioritised person-to-person interactions over person-to-brand interactions.

According to research by Social@Ogilvy, as reported in the Philadelphia Business Journal, organic post reach for pages with 500,000 or more followers may be as low as two percent - while it could be even lower for smaller pages.

Image: Shutterstock

New data protection rules will frustrate consumers who demand personalised experiences but are wary of handing over their data, but organisations who prove trustworthy stand to benefit, according to experts.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on 25 May and gives people more control over what personal data organisations can collect, allowing them to move it to other companies or demand organisations delete it altogether.

It also requires companies to be more transparent about how they use people's personal information and gets rid of passive opt-outs some organisations relied on to obtain customer consent: now people must actively agree to their data being collected and processed.

As a result of that, and with GDPR making people more aware of the value of their data, marketers' jobs are about to get harder, according to The Content Advisory's privacy lead, Tim Walters, speaking at Aprimo's recent Sync Europe conference.

"I am convinced that GDPR will rather significantly reduce the amount of first party and third-party data that marketing teams have access to," he said.

Walters said the data was the fuel for marketing efforts and pointed to a recent report by Accenture that identified a more systemic or structural problem that is choking off the supply of fuel for customer management.

But he pointed to a "vicious circle" being created by GDPR, where customers want "hyper-relevant" experiences when shopping online, but are very reluctant to hand over their personal data that would inform those relevant experiences.

"Consumers will punish brands that do not provide ... relevant experiences by abandoning them for other providers," he said. "Not because they necessarily know that another provider can provide that experience, but because [they] hope that they can."

However, on the other hand, GDPR and the high profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, where millions of Facebook users' profile data was harvested to allegedly influence US voters in the 2016 presidential election, has increased public awareness about the risks around sharing their data.

"The fact that they don't know what's going on with the data that they surrender ... means that they are reluctant to provide that personal data. which is precisely necessary to create the kinds of experiences that they demand," said Walters, adding: "That's the vicious circle."

But GDPR provides an opportunity for companies that recognise people are in control of their personal data - creating that trust breaks the vicious cycle.

"Every company in the world, whether they are subject to GDPR or not, should be looking for some kind of framework or template or guidebook to show them how to go about putting consumers in control of their data," Walters concluded.

"That is the only way to make progress. That guidebook or template is exactly what the GDPR is."

Edmund Breault, head of marketing at Aprimo, told IT Pro that GDPR is absolutely going to help marketing organisations by putting customers at the heart of their efforts.

"While the efforts in the short term on marketing organisations to become GDPR-compliant have added burden, GDPR fundamentally makes customer-centricity a "legal" requirement," he said.

"We are now in a trust economy and marketers need to provide capabilities to allow consumers to stay in control of their data."