If you want to transform your marketing in 2025, look past what’s in vogue. Start focusing on creating a foundational understanding of your customer that you can leverage to build real relationships, and translate that into a solid first-party data strategy powered by the right technology, data, and services.
As Michael Jordan said, “Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.”
But how exactly do you build real relationships with consumers? It’s no different than how people build relationships with each other—by engaging in meaningful conversations that flow naturally over time.
Unlike people speaking to each other, marketers need to engage consumers at scale—through channels. Unfortunately, channels come with limitations. The challenge begins when marketers try to unify data collected from disparate places as there could be rampant redundancy, inaccuracy, and conflicting information across data from each channel. Marketers usually only have a few data points to inform a conversation with any given customer, making it difficult to create a conversation starter. And they struggle even more to develop a relevant message for consumers they’ve never encountered.
Even when marketers do have enough understanding of an individual to craft a message, the opaque nature of channels (particularly digital channels) gets in the way of engaging in a relevant conversation. If you can’t recognize that person when you encounter them in a specific channel, you can’t deliver your message, much less coordinate your messages across channels. It is also difficult to tie insights from each interaction back to the individual, particularly in a consumer-friendly and privacy-compliant manner.
The result? Marketers often end up talking at people vs. with them. And that’s not what consumers are looking for when choosing to engage with a brand. According to Epsilon research, 76% of consumer respondents view a brand negatively when marketing includes inaccurate information about them. And they see a lot of it—91% percent of respondents said they see at least one irrelevant ad a day.
Identity resolution alone is not sufficient for brands to achieve their desired objective—specifically to harmonize engagement with consumers across paid, owned, and earned channels and create the seamless conversations needed to build strong relationships. To do so, marketers need more than just identity resolution—they also require marketing and media solutions that come pre-loaded with identity, data, creative capabilities, services, and (everyone’s favorite buzzword) artificial intelligence.
To deliver against these objectives, brands need to seek out a small number of partners that can provide them with “1 View, 1 Vision, and 1 Voice”:
Let’s start with view. There’s no question that unifying and cleaning up your first-party data can be a daunting task. And a lot of vendors—CDP, clean room, identity resolution providers, and consultants—can help you address parts of this. But the complexity of managing so many disparate vendors is a substantial challenge. And it gets harder from there.
Given marketers have a limited understanding of any given customer, they also require partners that can augment their existing data to develop a more comprehensive understanding of each individual. This could be information about what your customers buy from other brands, why they buy, where to find them, and when to engage them. That partner should also be able to help you expand beyond your customer base, providing the data needed to identify the universe of potential buyers for your products or services.
With a limited view of their customers and prospects, marketers’ vision for engaging each individual is often limited to “delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.” In practice, that usually equates to “delivering a somewhat relevant message to an audience of some of the right people at a moment in time.”
Your partner should help expand beyond your customer base, providing the data needed to identify the universe of potential buyers for your products, driving the acquisition and growth of new customers by crafting relevant messages for any given individual at any point in time.
Leveraging a comprehensive view of the universe of your potential buyers allows you to craft a relevant message for any given individual at any point in time.
However, brands should not stop there and instead should look for partners who enable them to understand where to engage buyers (and where not to), how often to engage them—in total, and in any given place—and how much to spend to engage them based on the likely near-term performance and long-term potential of each consumer. Most importantly, your partners should help evolve your vision as each person does, adjusting in real-time and across time to ensure the conversation is always relevant, outcomes are maximized and waste is minimized.
Even armed with a comprehensive view of their potential buyers and a robust vision for engaging each individual, marketers still can’t achieve their objectives unless they are also working with partners who enable them to engage consumers with a singular voice that is harmonized across their paid, owned, and earned channels.
Achieving that full vision requires everything working from the same understanding of each consumer you’re speaking to. How that translates in tech terms is a strong identity resolution capability that’s embedded in data-enriched analytic, marketing, and media solutions and services. However, this can be a tall order that not many partners can actually fulfill by themselves.
Legacy technologies, mix-and-match tech stacks, and the divide between adtech and martech all present challenges here. It’s critical that brands find the right partner whose marketing and media technology can recognize consumers in any channel and capture insights from each interaction.
The bottom line is that you don’t have to overcomplicate your 2025 marketing resolutions. Mastering the fundamentals is both more challenging than it may sound but also more feasible than it has ever been.
Know your customers. Engage them in relevant conversations. Build trusted relationships. And the sales will come.
