Overcome Marketing Fatigue Across Channels
Consumers’ attention span is shortening while brands are increasing digital engagement initiatives, spreading marketing fatigue. Learn how to overcome it.
Published February 16, 2022
Last updated March 5, 2022
Marketers have recently been spelling out ‘marketing fatigue’ as one of the prevalent problems that can lead to customer churn. According to Deloitte’s 2021 Digital Consumer Trends Report, the churn rate in certain global markets can be as high as 30%, implying that businesses have difficulty holding onto existing customers.
Increasing marketing fatigue among customers could be detrimental to a business, stagnating any future growth possibilities. However, it would be unfair to assume that marketers are taking no action.
On the contrary, companies have been multiplying their digital initiatives and honing new virtual engagement techniques for the past few years. So how come customers are becoming less receptive? Are they feeling overwhelmed by the myriad of attention-grabbing marketing messages across multiple channels, and is there something that companies can do?
In this article, we will look into why marketing fatigue could be setting it and how businesses can tackle this issue across their marketing channels.
What are the causes of marketing fatigue?
There are numerous reasons why marketing fatigue could kick in. However, it all boils down to the following aspects.
Content overload across channels
One of the dark sides of the omnichannel marketing approach is that the vast amount of messages bombard customers via different platforms and from multiple brands. As companies compete for consumers’ attention, audiences appear to be withdrawing, with 47% of customers seeking downtime from internet-enabled devices.
Yes, people still love buying; however, they no longer buy into invasive marketing techniques, decreasing customer receptiveness.Â
Repetitive marketing campaigns
Marketers try to keep the brands at the forefront of customers’ minds; however, people are often indifferent. Drip campaigns, repetitive ads, and messages can quickly bore and annoy customers. Consequently, the effectiveness of advertising leads to poor outcomes or even rejection amongst the audiences.
High solicitation of prospects
Active solicitation of prospects adversely affects their positive spending intentions and long-term engagement with a brand. The effect is amplified by simultaneous direct advertising campaigns run by competing brands seeking to target audiences who meet specific criteria. As consumers occupy the middle ground, they begin to experience a digital burnout, failing to understand the brands’ value.
Metrics that reveal the phenomenon’s worsening effects
With the availability of marketing analytics tools, businesses can quickly decode and pick up on the signs of subpar marketing campaigns that no longer resonate with the customers. Lower conversions, fewer leads, higher bounce rates, and decreasing email open rates – are indicators of degrading customer engagement.
In parallel, marketing teams can often experience burnout, desperately trying to engage customers but failing to develop fresh concepts. Stagnant ideas with ever-evolving customer needs do not go hand-in-hand; thus, shifting the culture and meeting customers where they are is even more challenging.
The need to think differently
Marketing has always been about building a relationship that translates into growing revenue, but how do you rebuild the relationship with fatigued customers?
Personalise across channels
Customers have different levels of tolerance to brand messages. While some can tolerate high levels of exposure to marketing campaigns, others find a way to block them. Therefore, businesses must personalise across channels to create a digital relationship based on loyalty and trust.Â
Combating marketing fatigue requires marketers to carefully curate messages to be relevant, timely, and, most importantly, less invasive. Customers crave authentic experiences, necessitating orchestration and delivery of connected engagements across all channels.
Use conversational marketing to increase digital engagements
Engaging different vehicles of content and more inclusive marketing formats is another approach that companies can use to fight fatigue. For instance, 83% of buyers state that they are more loyal to a brand that offers a chatbot function for handling customer inquiries.
Adding chat functions, forms, or social media surveys provides a real-time customer experience that ultimately leads to deeper and more meaningful engagements. Consumers’ attention spans are as short as 8 seconds, so marketers and sales teams need to keep their messages and methods fresh, cleverly leveraging buyers’ behaviour, interests, and propensity to engage.
Leverage push & pull marketing
Awakening of fatigued audiences requires careful consideration when to press the breaks. Businesses need to curate their communication across less effective platforms if a prospect feels saturated in a given channel but engages via other means.Â
Indeed, aggressive campaigns can result in digital burnout and apathy. Finding synergy between push and pull marketing approaches is critical. Marketing and sales teams need to adjust the exposure to the message in line with a slowdown in engagement or buying velocity.
Test, analyse and iterate
Thanks to customer experience real-time tracking, sentiment analysis, and CDP platforms, brands can utilise rigorous testing and analysis techniques to gauge what truly clicks with their target audiences. Using such platforms, marketers can capture buyers exactly where they are and induce re-engagement through customers’ preferred channels. Sometimes customers experience a content overload on one channel but wouldn’t mind engaging on a different channel with a different form of content. This is where testing can reveal new opportunities for brands.
Create relevant, timely and personalised campaigns
Relating to consumers on their own terms is what is called for now. Brands should take personalisation as their north node to enable higher engagement and subsequent conversions. Giving customers what they want, when, and where they want it is essential. Brands can leverage behavioural data and predictive analytics to design highly-personalised and contextual campaigns that will resonate with each customer segment in a non-intrusive but relevant manner. The growing interest of tools like Salesforce Interaction Studio confirm the market need for 1-to-1 real-time engagement. At Behavioural Response, we deliver Omnichannel Behavioural Campaigns (B2C and B2B) that apply marketing data to create segments based on subtle customer characteristics such as demographics, preferred channels, beliefs, values, and behavioural patterns to meet customers where they are and reveal a contextually relevant path to purchase.
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Final Thoughts
Companies are no longer just competing with each other; they are also trying to re-energise their customers and reclaim their attention. Thus, organisations must be innovative about their approach to overcoming marketing fatigue.
Connect with Behavioural Response to learn more about Omnichannel Behavioural Campaigns for both B2B or B2C business models.
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