Category: Contributor Blogs

Hispanics have been the country’s key indicators of consumer sentiment since the COVID-19 crisis began. But for too long, this group has been viewed as a single segment. Aside from being the largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S., Latinos are a diverse, intersectional group with different experiences, perspectives and expectations. 

Latinos are a community of limitless diversity yet firmly connected by culture, language and shared experiences.

The U.S. Latino experience is hard to define and is often perceived as synonymous with the immigrant experience. But the truth is that most Latino youths are not immigrants. Two-thirds were born in the U.S. This young supergroup is optimistic about their futures and are bilingual and bi-cultural and place a high value on educational attainment and career success. This community also consumes media differently, and when it comes to inclusion and representation, has firm expectations of content creators, media platforms and brands/advertisers.

Latinos have notably increased their political power and are raising their voices everywhere from the boardroom to our classrooms to Capitol Hill. With Latino buying power projected to be $2.6 trillion in just about three years, America is taking note and so are brands and advertisers. Learn more about today’s U.S. Latino community, its intersectional identities and how brands can tailor their dialogue with America’s greatest untapped opportunity.

The marketing industry remains abuzz over the demise of third-party cookies, with many feeling doom and gloom due to cookies’ upcoming extinction.

True, cookies collect data that allows marketers to better tailor customer experiences, but their limited shelf-life undercuts marketers’ ability to evolve personalization efforts over time. That’s why now is an extraordinary opportunity for marketers to rethink their audience engagement strategies; without the crutch of cookies, marketers can leverage new tools and techniques to learn about consumers on an even more detailed level, and therefore deliver more targeted and relevant communications to them.

While third-party cookies aren’t planned to be removed from Google Chrome until the end of 2023, that deadline isn’t as far off as some marketers may think—meaning now’s the time to prepare if they want to be able to outperform competitors when the opportunity finally comes. Here’s what marketers should know:

Personalization needs to be a marketing priority

Consumers want to feel understood by the brands they engage with, instead of just part of the masses. Ninety percent of U.S. consumers find marketing personalization appealing—and yet Nielsen’s 2021 Annual Marketing Report reveals that only 13% of medium-sized companies (marketing budgets less than $10M) and 2% of large companies (marketing budgets of $10M+) named personalization as their top strategy within their marketing mix. Especially in a soon-to-be-cookieless world, marketers need to adopt new practices for securing the level of personal detail that fuels authentic, tailored consumer experiences in a privacy compliant way.

The death of cookies presents a timely opportunity for marketers to rethink how they engage consumers, approaching marketing as an ongoing two-way conversation between a brand and individuals. As consumer preferences and priorities constantly change, it is challenging to translate these changing desires into campaigns that are both timely and targeted. To overcome this obstacle, marketers need to understand their user base—and they’ll need robust first-party data to do this.

It’s time for first-party data to shine

A history of overreliance on cookies means that some marketers don’t have well-defined first-party data collection strategies in place, a strategy to best leverage that data. It’s time to strengthen those strategies.

Marketing technology can help brands measure audience behaviors with confidence. For example, an analytics system with attribution capabilities can help marketers monitor their consumers’ online habits and better understand their shopping priorities. From website browsing, to app usage, marketers will be able to identify how well the messaging and channels they’re deploying are influencing audiences and can then adjust tactics.

Another opportunity for brands to secure audience insights is to strengthen their relationships with retailers who also recognize the necessity of collecting first-party data. Both sides benefit from data-sharing. If brand marketers can see who is buying their products (e.g., if it’s a few customers buying high quantities, or many customers buying lower quantities) and what other products those shoppers are also buying, then there is a more robust picture of the target demographic. This information then enables marketers to refine their positioning to make a bigger impact on audiences. As a result, consumers will be encouraged to shop from that brand and build an affinity with the retailers who are stocking those products.

Transparency goes a long way

In today’s privacy-first data environment, it’s essential for marketers collecting consumer data to do so compliantly. For example, many consumers are opting to not share their data while interacting with a brand’s app, despite how it will benefit their shopping experience. That’s why marketers must make an effort to articulate the value of collecting consumers’ data. Transparency garners trust. When marketers don’t explain why they’re asking for user data, that’s when suspicions arise.

To overcome consumers’ hesitation—and outright refusal—to share data, marketers can ask clearer consent questions to articulate the benefit of exchanging information. Even if few consumers consent, marketers will still be in good standing as long as they have a representative pool of their audience insights. Then they can leverage their martech investments to build predictive models that guide cross-platform media planning and ad allocation based on the findings.

The marketing industry is on the cusp of major change—for the better. The death of cookies will force many marketers to rethink how to engage and learn about their audiences, simultaneously pushing them to develop more revealing, scalable tactics than they had with cookies. While there’s still some time before cookies become obsolete, now is the time for marketers to strengthen their first-party sources before competitors have time to catch up.

This article originally appeared on DMCNY.com.

As brands seek ways to establish deeper, more personalized connections with consumers, they’re engaging social media influencers more heavily than in previous years. This increased focus speaks to both fragmenting media consumption and the significant engagement that many influencers boast across channels like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

While influencer marketing was not born out of the pandemic, social circumstances over the past 18-plus months have fostered a stronger need for interpersonal connection among consumers, and social media has delivered. On Instagram, for example, data from Nielsen InfluenceScope, a solution suite that measures social media influencers, shows that the top 10 influencers by engagement rate have a combined 110 million global followers. The top 10 total interactions with those influencers commanded an engagement rate of 28%.

The massive follower bases and engagement rates across social media platforms have not gone unnoticed by brands. The 2021 Nielsen Annual Marketing Report, for example, noted that marketers planned to increase their social media spend more than any other channel, including growing options like online video and podcasts.

While influencer marketing represents a sub-category within the broader social media landscape, it’s one that brands should approach with a focus on long-term collaboration. But step 1 for any collaboration involves identifying an influencer that fits the brand’s personality and purpose—something that 86% of Nielsen’s InfluenceScope clients represent as a challenge. As with most marketing hurdles, data is critical in identifying consumer behavior, trends and possible partnerships in the influencer marketing space. 

California-based e.l.f Cosmetics recently began amplifying its own organic efforts with campaigns on TiKTok as a means to engage Gen Z consumers. Understanding the influence of music of Gen Z, the brand developed its own song, “Eye, Lips, Face,” which it used as the foundation for a TikTok campaign that garnered 1 billion views in just six days, according to Nielsen InfluenceScope. The song was the first piece of branded content to hit No. 1 on TikTok’s organic trends list and continues to engage, with more than 6 billion views to date and more than 5 million user-generated videos created as part of the campaign’s associated challenge.

Influencer James Charles (30+ million followers) was among the top influencers to promote the brand, and his posts drove a 12.88% engagement rate, which is almost 6x higher than the average engagement rate of influencers with a similar fan base. Engagement rates (i.e., the total interactions divided by followers and multiplied by 100) are used to determine the level of follower interaction with content posted to a specific social media platform. As an influencer, Charles’ promotion alone generated 167 million views.

Importantly, not all campaigns start with a brand. In fact, the actions of influencers are often the inspiration for campaigns. That’s because social media influencers are avid promoters of the products and services they love, and their organic efforts can lead to big opportunities for brands. For example, American clothing company Gap learned about the rising power of TikTok influencers well before it even had an account of its own. A range of influencers did all the work when they started uploading videos of themselves wearing logoed Gap hoodie sweatshirts of varying colors toward the end of 2020 and into 2021. Then, TikTok star Barbara Kristoffersen posted a video wearing a shade of brown the company hadn’t made since the early 2000s.

The #brownhoodie influencer effort boasted an engagement rate of 188.35%, it sparked an influx of the no-longer-made hoodies on resale sites for up to $300, and the #gaphoodie hashtag had over 6.5 million views. All of this helped inspire Gap to bring back the brown hoodie in July 2021 and its popularity has kept it out of stock on the company’s e-commerce site. Importantly, Kristoffersen has just over 273,000 followers, which is notably lower than many influencers. This highlights that retail opportunity is not limited to accounts boasting millions of followers.

Influencer marketing is not unique to TikTok. Across social media, however, TikTok does boast the highest engagement rate, which is driven by a younger, female-weighted average demographic (18-24). The analyzed campaigns have also been able to better reach this targeted audience on TikTok than on other platforms (always above 50%).

The growing appeal of influencer marketing among brands is clear with respect to the appeal of channels like YouTube and TikTok to younger generations, but influence isn’t limited to specific age groups, and the impact of influence is growing.

For example, according to Nielsen Scarborough, nearly one-in-five Americans (19.3%) agree or somewhat agree that a celebrity endorsement may influence a product purchase. But influence doesn’t have to come from celebrities. In fact, more than two-in-five Americans (41.6%) seek the advice of others for purchase decisions, and 70% read online reviews before making a purchase. 

The opportunity for brands is to establish themselves as trusted sources for consumers—so they, too, can gain the ability to influence purchases. Nielsen Scarborough data shows that 83% of Americans say that they stick with brands they like, but just 22.6% like to connect with brands on social media networking sites. Influencer marketing can help brands begin to bridge that 60% gap—and start to measure the results.