Author name: khazi@cubera.co

The post-Covid world has witnessed a surge in almost all sectors of e-commerce activity, emerging technologies and improved advertising techniques such as Omni Channel advertising shoulder the blame. The deployment of AI and Machine Learning concepts to B2B and B2C models have resulted in improved conversion rates and enhanced sales figures. Marketing and advertising have come quite a long way, from the humble Out of Home (OOH) format to the next-gen Web3 iteration, the world has witnessed it all. Looking for new customers has its own set of challenges. Taking into account the emergence of new trends and technologies, picking out the right set of people who shall be interested in your product/service can be a bit tricky. The universal set of customers has become more diverse than ever before, diversity seemingly has been increasing exponentially in this digital age. While AI and Machine Learning have driven efficient results, there’s more to their deployment than automation. The surge in AI reliance for acquiring new customers and engaging them has become more noticeable. Close to 56% of leading marketers believe the fact that AI-based data-driven marketing is more accurate and efficient than experience-based practices. Lead generation in the age of big data, with streams of zero, first, and third-party data calls for efficient and out-of-the-box methods. While techniques like Lookalike Modeling look and work great on paper, their deployment often calls for improvement. Lookalike Modeling: The Basics Speaking of Lookalike modeling’s proposed enhancement, one should first understand what it is in the first place. Your zero-party data strategy might be working well for the existing set of customers, but what about the ones you’ve yet to discover? This is where Lookalike Modeling comes into play. Lookalike Modeling assists the advertiser in identifying and targeting those segments that act and behave in the same way as their current customer base. The best part is that the predicted segment hasn’t been reached out to yet. This technique not only allows the advertiser to tap into new segments but also helps them streamline their strategies on the current customer base. Omni Channel advertising techniques can benefit from Lookalike Modeling a lot since the deployment of customer-centric content across multiple channels can also garner a similar response from the segments that are projected to be potential targets. The Omni Channel advertising technique has become a mainstay of a number of industries today. A good marketer with the right know-how can retain 90% of the customers using the Omni Channel Advertising technique alone. This reliance on Omni Channel also necessitates the usage of Lookalike Modeling. The aforementioned points on Lookalike Modeling paint a very good picture for advertisers. However, one shouldn’t rely solely on the current practices alone. Being aware and on par with the upcoming trends can not only benefit your existing marketing strategy but can also help you with the updates you’ll be making to the said plan in the future as well. Here’s what the future of Lookalike Modeling might look like The complexity of algorithms driving complex systems only tends to increase with the passage of time. As of now, a gazillion systems might be running on the same algorithm as yours. So, how would you establish the differentiating factor and gain the edge? Well, in such situations, the data becomes the differentiating factor. This is where your zero- party data strategy can be taken advantage of. Data has always been the buzzword, but the addition of terms like “privacy,” “encryption,” etc. to the mix has turned out to be a strong driving force when it comes to attracting new customers. Lookalike Modeling’s fuel, when enriched with state-of-the-art encryption techniques and improved zero-party data inclusion shall give rise to accurate targeting and acquisition of customers sharing the same interests as the ones from your current campaign. The future of Lookalike Modeling is nigh, and this is what you need to know: The paradigm shift is inevitable For the most part, supervised learning when combined with Lookalike Modeling gives decent results. The problem, however, arises the moment an unlabeled data set is fed to the system. This reduces the chances of exploration of attributes that might not be visible at first glance. The inclusion of unsupervised learning after going through a series of supervised cycles has been shown to yield accurate results. Since unsupervised learning doesn’t work with labeled data sets, the discovery of hidden patterns is carried out by the system itself. This technique gives rise to the discovery and probable targeting of traits that are subtle but important for the most part. Some subtle traits might even turn out to be the new identifiers for the data set that you’re willing to target in the upcoming days. The human clearance won’t lose its viability While the shift from supervised to unsupervised learning is inevitable, the idea of eliminating human clearance cannot be achieved. The reason being that human clearance at the end of the day might put the entire process back on track if it has deviated from the way before. The reliance on unsupervised learning has its benefits, but one cannot be entirely sure of the results shared after the modeling process. Certain aspects if added to the set of potential customer behaviors might end up creating a different persona altogether. And if the modeling process continues to work upon the wrongly evolving set, the results will start to vary, and in some cases, they might even vary drastically. Hence, the need for human intervention has been prophesized. Creation of sub-models with evolving privacy measures Data privacy has not only become mainstream but has also become one of the major factors that has led to the adoption of new and safe data extraction methods. Industries are focusing more towards the self-declared aspect of data than the extraction process. Your zero-party data strategy will do wonders if done the right way, establishing faith is a key component of the extraction process. However, the extraction of said zero-party data has to evolve with the evolution of privacy regulations as well. This brings into account the deployment of sub-models. Think of them as smaller repositories

The year 2022 has been a period of uncertainties, where the entire world economy has gone through a disastrous pandemic era. The Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions drastically impacted every business, it gave them a rejuvenating time to regain their energy and commence operations at their full potential. As we are on the verge of entering a new year, economic recessions are the other major threat that we are confronting at this phase of time. This will make it erroneous for the inception of innovative ideas and only those who are incredibly expert and prove the value of their product will survive. This blog will introduce you to the AdTech trends that could produce notable outcomes in the upcoming year. New Strategies of the AdTech Industry Long-term brand building The uncertain scenario always compels marketers to conduct performance marketing rather than building a strong brand. Ideally, marketers should give great prominence to the long-term brand building so that when consumers are ready to purchase, this brand has to be at the top of their minds.  Performance marketing is always imperative but at unpredictable times, marketers must move forward with a strategy that can drive sustainable results. Proficient marketers must coordinate brand-building and performance marketing as one, simultaneously resulting in higher er r er OAS( Return On Advertising Spend). Subsequently, it ensures the brand’s popularity above everything. Value-based decision making  For a brand to sustain itself in an unprecedented time, advertisers have to align their activities with the values of their target audience. This is what we saw when Elon Musk takeover Twitter which resulted in half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers seemingly halting spending on the platform amid brand safety concerns. In the upcoming years, we are going to witness a drastic change in businesses to operate in an environmentally sustainable way to meet consumer expectations. As far as consumers are concerned, they are least interested in brands talking about sustainability, rather they want to see it embedded into business strategies. High focus on first-party data  Until now advertisers heavily depended on third-party cookies for collecting data. The surge in privacy-driven restrictions has consequently resulted in the compulsion of the entire digital advertising industry to reanalyze its marketing strategies. Due to the recently announced privacy regulations, marketers have to come up with a new solution to target the audience. Contextual audience targeting by Adtech companies is probably going to become quite popular in 2023. Contextual advertising is a kind of targeted advertising that takes keywords and content of the webpage into consideration when displaying ads instead of user behavior. Efficient utilization of video advertising campaigns  Video can grasp the attention of the audience far better than any other medium. Thus, video ad campaigns can produce more lucrative results than any other mode of advertisement. The recent statistics on video advertising ascertains that viewers are likely to retain 95% of the information they receive through video, compared to the 10% absorption rate via text. The impact of video advertising campaigns was much evident from the social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. As these platforms staggered into popularity among users has motivated brands to utilize these channels for running their ad campaigns.  Brands can make use of video ads to raise awareness and make consumers about their brand. To make it highly successful, they have to research how their audience consumes video to mitigate their efforts. Transparency in brands  The year 2022 has been filled with a growing awareness of online users’ privacy rights, 2023 can be foreseen as marketers’ efforts to adapt to new changes formulated out of privacy issues.  As advertisers highly want to integrate their brand values and beliefs into users’ requirements, they will have to completely redefine their marketing strategies.  There are more chances to shift their focus on the value exchange between marketers and consumers where advertisers have to think about marketing efforts that build trust. High effectiveness of CTV  Data-driven connected TV viewing is expected to proliferate remarkably considering the fact that more than 68% of TV viewing already is from streaming devices. Hence, CTV can be included among the ones that provide subsequent advertising opportunities in the year 2023. AI in digital marketing  Artificial intelligence(AI) has found its role in digital marketing due to the challenges that both publishers and advertisers confront when trying to run effective ad campaigns. When companies leveraged traditional strategies and techniques to analyze data and monitor performance they still struggled to reach the desired customers. Eventually, companies started to embrace AI solutions to achieve targeted results due to big data analytics. Thus, companies started to make better predictions and more result-driven strategies. Traditional panel-based distribution  Marketers are turning to new technologies that maintain track of continuously changing consumer behavior as traditional panel-based measurement fast becomes obsolete. They are moving away from conventional panel-based measurement and shifting their spending from linear TV to CTV as they search for new alternatives. To sum up The change to privacy-first advertising and the widespread deprecation of ad IDs will propel programmatic advertising into an inventive phase in 2023. For the industry to adapt and flourish, the adoption of industry standards, consideration of contextual signals, and development of open data exchange channels will be essential. First-party data sources are essential for efficient brand promotion as always. Additionally, programmatic advertising may succeed as we move into the year 2023 if we take advantage of emerging techniques in the market like CTV, DOOH, digital audio, and gaming.

Across all online platforms, including personalized website content, social media channels, or even their YouTube or Spotify premium playlist, 81% of consumers today expect brands to learn about them and offer them individualized content. Users yearn for a personalized experience that will speed up, simplify, and, above all, make their decision-making process intuitive. However, some brands might still struggle with personalization. Mention reports that 83% of marketers say their biggest challenge is correctly implementing it. Customer Engagement by making personalized website might not appear as difficult now that AI-powered personalization platforms are available. The blog discusses some recommendations that should help your company create user-tailored content for your website to boost engagement. Strategies to personalize your website You can’t really personalize a visitor’s experience on a website without having the right kind of visitor data to support what you’re planning, so that is where the problem lies when it comes to website personalization. Your ability to create and add more individualized content to your website as well as boost engagement and sales will increase as you learn more about your visitors. Below are some ideas which can help you in personalizing your website. Collecting data of the visitors The secret to boost customer engagement in a customer-centric and highly dynamic marketplace is the ability to grab the attention of your prospects while collecting the right kind of data and successfully using it to smoothen your marketing strategies. Additionally, businesses that can use this information to their advantage outperform their rivals by 85% in terms of sales volume and 25% in terms of gross margin. It’s important to consider the type of visitor data you have to comprehend your prospects as you begin to develop a strategy to implement website personalization. After that, you can determine the most effective methods and ways to provide the experience the visitors expect by utilising the power of predictive analysis and machine learning. Customer Profiling The next step is creating customer profiles after gathering the visitor’s data from all the necessary sources. A customer profile, also referred to as a persona, acts as a thorough manual that explains the strategies you can employ to connect with your ideal target market. It provides you with a detailed understanding of your customers’ objectives and what they are searching for on your website, which can be used to develop more specialized messaging strategies that will appeal to them. Goal Setting Here’s where you start setting goals for your website and for each of your customer personas. Goals can range from boosting conversions to decreasing bounce rates, facilitating the discovery of products or services to encouraging repeat business, and much more. Additionally, your objectives may differ based on various audience segments, organizations and industry, and even geographical locations. Creating a strategy Preparing foolproof strategies to customize your website to increase customer engagement is, practically, where you start your personalization journey. Having a strategy streamlines your processes and systematizes your performances. It enables you to have a clear picture of the roadmap to your goal and doesn’t let you lose your track. As far as customization of the website is concerned, Homepage, Product Page, Search Results, No Search Results page and Shopping Cart Page are the pages that should be on your priority. Implementing the strategy Creating a strategy is not enough; thorough planning and implementation of the strategy are also required to boost engagement of the customers. After all of the preparation work has been completed, it is time to begin creating actual campaigns to carry out your personalization strategy. Write down all of the major goals for the website personalization program before it begins. Make a list of all the pages and elements you want to improve and customize. After you’ve identified campaigns and made all of your other preparations, the next step is to create a system for prioritizing your written campaigns. Compare the expected effects of each campaign to the level of difficulty. Use the appropriate algorithms to optimize your campaigns. It is also critical to test and iterate on website personalization campaigns on a regular basis. Measuring the success It’s crucial to use the appropriate metrics to assess how well your website personalization is working. Not just in terms of charting the effectiveness of the campaigns you drafted and implemented, but also for figuring out your ROI channels and assessing how well they’re serving you. Benefits of Website Personalization The essential component to improving the user experience is personalization. Your users’ possibilities of entering the conversion funnel and becoming devoted customers increase the better you cater to their needs and wants. The following are some advantages of customizing your website: Personalization of your website can improve your customer’s experience. You can get more qualified leads who are more likely to enter your sales funnel. By customizing your website, you can optimize your landing pages. Understanding your website’s visitors, prospects, and customers better and providing them with a personalized experience increases brand affirmation. Conclusion Web personalization is a field of knowledge that enables you to connect with your customers effectively and efficiently, engage with them, enhance your cross-channel marketing strategies, and multiply your ROI. Cubera can assist if you want to customize your website to give your customers a better experience. Your customers’ preferences can be understood and catered to by using Cubera‘s rich identity graphs and zero-party data.

The holiday season brings forth a plethora of opportunities for buyers and sellers alike. It’s a win-win situation for all of us. As per the numbers, this year’s holiday e-commerce activity shows an estimated increment of 15.5%. This brings the total number to a staggering $236 billion when it comes to overall holiday e-commerce activity. In case you’re wondering how to target your custom audiences this year, fret not for we’ve got you covered. As a marketer, you’ll be dabbling into the realm of e-commerce almost on a daily basis. This constant involvement calls for a robust strategy that’ll assist you in increasing your ROI. Marketing in its own right is one of the most powerful and accessible tools to garner people’s attention toward your brand. For example, the cost of digital content marketing is 62% less than the conventional methods. ROI dictates almost all business actions these days. The better the numbers are, the more likely your business is to gain an edge over the competition. So, if boosting your ROI is such a crucial aspect of establishing your brand’s presence, what steps should you take to achieve the best results? Well, this is where the following points come into the picture. Personalization is the key Running a personalized marketing strategy works wonders for your business model. To put it simply, the more personalized your approach is, the more likely the customer is to believe you. Close to 80% of customers are highly likely to buy from a brand that approaches them with a personalized ad, mail, or any other message as per their marketing campaign. Once you’ve established your understanding of your target audience, you can study their buying prowess and map the results with a cohort that shows a similar interest. This establishment of understanding between your brand and the customer is crucial as 70% of customers show loyalty to the brands that understand the customers’ needs. Speaking of the aforementioned mapping process, you can in fact create your lookalike audience from the existing bunch that shows interest in your personalized approach. Absolute personalization can also be achieved if you take into account the data that you’ve been gathering all this time. You can deploy sophisticated AI-powered automation, combine the existing zero-party data with third-party data streams, and a robust audience manager. The more channels you tackle, the better One absolutely effective way of creating custom audiences during this holiday season is to approach them on as many channels as possible. It’s pretty simple, allocate a budget for the total number of channels that you wish to reach people on. There’s a catch though, it’s up to you how you spend your money on each channel. Say, if a strong set of customers are flocking to a couple of channels out of a dozen, then it would be wise to invest more on the two channels than the others. For example, as of 2021, users have been spending an average of 10 hours per month on Instagram. It trails right behind Facebook as the most probable social media platform for marketers on this planet. So, as a marketer looking for the right channels to tackle during the holiday season, you would be more interested in Instagram and Facebook than other social media channels. Emails have been a strong channel for marketers as well. With personalized email copies, marketers have been able to target the right audiences at the right time. Global email users are expected to reach a figure of 4.48 billion by 2024, one more reason for you to choose email as another potential channel from the list of channels. Location-based marketing can work wonders for you A whopping $66.61 billion market size is expected to appear on the horizon by 2028. This figure relates to the location-based services aspect of businesses. While the digital realm attracts almost a gazillion users every day, brick-and-mortar stores are adopting trends to stay in the game as well. You can literally use a certain percentage of your custom audiences who might be in close proximity to a physical store with an enticing offer. In fact, you can target the said chunk via personalized emails and messages, reminding them about the latest offer that the brick-and-mortar store is talking about. Location plays a huge role in determining your customer’s buying behavior as well. The more options a place offers to the customer, the more they’ll be interested in exploring it. You can also gather intelligence based on one location and map the same on a separate one to get a lookalike audience for your campaign. Loyalty matters, probably the most Perhaps one of the most important aspects when it comes to preparing for the holiday season is your ability to retain the customers you come across. Customer loyalty gives rise to customer retention which is just the icing on the cake. Customer loyalty management is literally a thing and it shouldn’t be taken lightly, in fact, the said industry is valued at $4 billion as of 2022. And, it is expected to reach $18 billion by 2028. Establishing loyalty is a game of patience while providing the best services to your long-time customers. Moreover, you can start a set of exclusive perks and rewards for those long-time customers who have been loyal to you. Their loyalty is not only a permanent number on the statistical sheet as they can also help you increase the existing number of customers quite efficiently. References work tremendously in favor of businesses. A reference from a loyal customer is more likely to get a new customer onboard. Plus, the fact that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain one, also falls in your favor. Long story short The holiday season involves a ton of planning and the right execution of the said plans at the right time. While increasing the ROI is everyone’s go-to approach, deploying the right strategies is what drives the numbers you’re looking for. If you’re a marketer struggling to keep up with the right tools and data for your campaign, then Cubera is your go-to option. With a state-of-the-art audience manager, algorithms, identity graphs, and much