Facebook recently launched its first enterprise offering citing an already impressive 1,000 global organisations and 100,000 groups using the service formerly known as Facebook at Work.
Rebranded ‘Facebook Workplace’ its biggest strength could be its familiarity. However, people already have a bevvy of apps, documents, and email they use to get work done. So how does Workplace change the game for the modern day marketer?
The answer, as ever, rests in changing consumer interests. For many of us, Facebook is a personal social network, whilst LinkedIn is a professional one. Challenging this, the first cohort to have literally grown up on Facebook and be taught coding at school are now taking over positions of responsibility within work and become higher spenders in their personal lives.
The introduction of Facebook Workplace will likely to lead to unified social identities by collecting data about its users which crosses both their professional and personal personas – a goldmine for brands looking to connect with potential and current Gen Z customers.
What does this mean for B2C companies?
Generation Z is unfazed and unafraid of technology, however, their relationship with brands is very much give and take. They are willing to hand over their data but only in return for a better experience. As Jeff Simpson, Principal at Deloitte Consulting states “If you’re on-trend and have got the style right, then they’re there with you. If you miss it and step out of line, then it will be hard to get them back.”
Ignoring what makes Gen Z tick and carrying on with today’s tactics won’t be an option for brands looking to succeed. Today, customers set the expectations, not competitors – making it challenging but exciting times for brands. So instead, the real question is how will marketers have to adapt to connect with the next generation of workers who live and breathe mobile and social media?
As a new era of B2C companies is born focused on putting the customer first, serving tailored and personalised experiences based on a customer’s likes and dislikes will become more important. Brands like Birchbox and Abel and Cole improve the experience of their product based on feedback each time. For example, the contents of the box won’t be the same if you didn’t like the products they included last time around.
Brands should be focused on creating hyper-personalised experiences that show a level of knowledge about their customers’ likes and dislikes, their position in the purchase journey and level of interest in the brand. Getting access to data about potential customers means that there is no excuse not to tailor their experience.
What does this mean for B2B marketers?
To make meaningful and emotional connections with customers it will simply not be enough to understand someone’s job at work or what drives them to make a purchase for their company; brands will need to understand a person’s unified persona to market to them most effectively. Knowing both personal connections and work drivers to instigate a B2B purchase. The key to knowing this is data – which will ultimately empower marketers in being able to do this. Not only will it allow for more sophisticated targeting across channels, but also across an individual’s numerous personas.
Understanding how a customer is behaving across the whole purchase funnel will also be essential in ensuring brands can market to unified personas. Taking a manual approach will not be effective enough based on the plethora of channels that marketers will be dealing with, and as unified personas will complicate data sets this will be another area for marketers to navigate.
The need for marketers to identify detailed profiling techniques, allowing them to understand where the consumption of media and the purchase journey transcends personas, is growing. Are there common patterns amongst Gen Z females working in sports fitness for example? How does their job affect their persona as a consumer? Are they just loyal to brands that echo the one they work for? In B2B, if you work in technology, how does this influence the hobbies you have? In building construction, does the work you do tend to impact the lifestyle you have? Marketers will be able to use all of this information to better target Gen Z despite their work and home personas crossing over through the devices they use and the social media sites they portray themselves on.
By integrating this data across their marketing campaigns and putting their solutions into one central platform that talks to one master database, marketers can succeed despite the complexities of unified personas. Only then will marketers hold the steering wheel to drive lasting, meaningful relationships with a mobile-first generation which has ample choice and are apathetic to brands.
By Conor Shaw, managing director EMEA at Marketo
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