What are the key skills marketers must cultivate in 2024 to build meaningful customer connections?

It’s Awards season across the marketing industry and, this Tuesday, the DMA will be celebrating this year’s most impactful campaigns among the very best talent the industry has to offer.

The DMA Awards are one of the most effective ways for marketers to show the industry who they are, why their marketing matters, and how their organisation is making an impact. At the DMA, we believe the very best campaigns fuse their creative, data-driven, and technological capabilities into perfect harmony; our community’s award-winning campaigns prove it.

Skills that build meaningful connections

As modern marketers, we must identify, empathise, and engage with our customers' needs like never before. Especially, as DMA research reveals, customer loyalty is at an all-time-low due to rising pricing sensitivity.

Marketers must create campaigns in a way that inspires and drives a meaningful connection with their customers. A customer-centric campaign isn’t just about getting someone’s attention; we must use a fusion of creativity, data, business values, and technology to deliver innovative campaigns full of meaningful solutions — persevering with this approach to build sustainable relationships founded on trust and transparency.

Creativity and data insights matter when it comes to building emotional engagement between consumers and brands. Highly creative campaigns generated four times as many brand effects and 33% more business effects for businesses in the last year [CMO Measurement Toolkit].

The most innovative campaigns can often invoke the most impassioned responses, drive customer engagement, and ultimately, increase brand loyalty with the consumer. In addition, to demonstrate their long-term value to the business, they have a balance of performance metrics and brand-building objectives.

Combination makes retail marketers effective

Brand investment is the key to stimulating future demand, while reducing price sensitivity and creating stickier, more loyal customers. Data-and-technology-driven campaigns have proven themselves to be particularly adept at boosting response campaign effectiveness, while highly creative campaigns find their strengths in boosting the number of brand effects per campaign.

Retail marketers proved themselves adepts at hitting performance marketing KPIs related to sales, average order value improvements, and a more-than-tripling of online sales effects over the last six years. And, it is in the brand building space where retail advertisers are showing particular foresight.

FMCG brands that obviously rely on the retail channel to reach their customers provide best practice examples of how to successfully build brands. Recent DMA Award winners such as Unilever for Dove and Sure, and Mondelez for Oreo, are examples of how brands have created emotional connections with consumers to stay top of mind, while shifting the dial on how people think and feel about their products – using data insights to better understand their needs and values, in order to communicate a message that resonates with their audience.

It is in the brand building space that the power of creativity is most apparent. When assessing the top 25% of retail campaigns based on DMA Award judges’ rating of their creativity, there is a clear brand multiplier at play. Highly creative retail campaigns tend to drive five times the number of brand effects vs the bottom 25%.

Upskilling core skillsets to engage

So, what does this mean for you and your marketing team?

Looking ahead to 2024, marketers need to develop this range of skills to create campaigns that balance brand-building and performance marketing activities. While we might be in the age of AI, it can only feed off the data insights we input into it and the creativity that lies within each and every one of us: only a skilled workforce can use it responsibly and to its best capabilities.

So, we must not forget to invest in our people. There is a vast amount of talent out there within organisations ready to advance their creative, data-driven, and digital marketing skillsets. But our deadline-driven culture in marketing means upskilling often falls by the wayside.

However, this is counter-intuitive for both marketers and their respective organisations, as they aren’t developing the confidence and enhanced skillsets to thrive in the digital era — getting left behind is a very real prospect.

A short-term investment of marketers’ precious time will lead to long-term results for the business – upskilling can make us all more productive, confident, and effective.

Businesses are facing some of their biggest challenges in decades, but, as marketers, we can do our part to stay relevant and drive sustainable business performance by not neglecting opportunities to enhance our skillsets.

To help, the DMA remains focused on our mission to make learning more affordable and convenient for our community. Therefore, we have extended our offering for discounted training opportunities to ensure marketers across the UK can embrace 2024 equipped with the confidence and knowledge to make a difference in their organisation.

We have a range of courses to help build your teams creative, data-driven, strategic, and technological skillset. All our courses are IDM accredited and underpinned by the DMA code so you can be sure the learning you receive is compliant with current data and marketing industry regulations. Learn how to capitalise on your marketing campaign data to meet and beat your strategic goals on the Award in Campaign Data Strategy, or deepen your understanding of data protection with our Responsible Marketing Masterclass.

Find a course for your team here or email training@theidm.com to learn more.