What is Cognitive Marketing and Why Should You Be Using It?

One of the most successful ways for marketers to entice potential customers to make a purchase or use a service from a specific brand is to form a connection with them. Connections help to inspire brand loyalty, advocacy and conversions, but they aren't always easy to create.

Cognitive marketing is one of the best ways to have deeper conversations with consumers and connect to them on a personal level. It essentially uses what people are already thinking about in a positive way to give a brand a position that reflects the customer's position. This helps the customer to see a similarity between themselves and the brand, helping to form a strong connection.

This is much easier to do now due to the technology at your fingertips, with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) making it simple to analyze data collected online to highlight the target audience and see what issues will resonate with customers the best. On top of this, cognitive technology offers the ability to cover several channels simultaneously, improving campaign visibility and better forging customer connections.

With cognitive marketing being so effective and now much easier to make the most of, marketers need to be including it in their strategies to create campaigns that fully target the intended audiences.

5 reasons you should incorporate cognitive marketing in your strategy

1. Puts the full focus on the customer

The focus of cognitive marketing campaigns is always on the target audience. This ensures that campaigns are fully targeted and as effective as they can be, removing other influences that could affect how well the brand-to-customer connection is forged.

If the basis for a campaign is the customer and their data is analyzed and used at each stage of its creation, not only is there a better chance of creating a connection, it will likely result in a stronger one and eliminate bad service, which has numerous benefits for a brand.

2. Creates more effective campaigns

Customers look to advertising and brands to help fulfil a need to be emotionally satisfied by products. Humans look for things that will help them meet their emotional needs, which means marketers should ensure they are speaking to what customers really want and not what they think they want.

Focusing campaigns on problems that aren't based on real customer experiences can ultimately lead to a lack of brand loyalty as customers are more likely to impulse buy products that they don't actually need. This can result in negative feelings towards a brand and limit repeat purchases, as well as damage advocacy.

Instead, cognitive marketing allows for the creation of campaigns that follow the path customers do in order to fill their emotional needs. You can base campaigns on problems that not only exist but are already in the consciousness of target customers, offering a solution that is required and boosting positive sentiment. This ultimately makes sure campaigns are more effective from initial contact, right through to purchase or repurchase.

3. Simplifies personalization

One of the best ways to make marketing campaigns more effective is to personalize them to each member of your target audience. This is one area where AI and cognitive technologies really come into play, as you can use real online behavior to better segment your audience and so alter your message for each group.

This works much better than traditional demographics that marketers use to segment an audience, as the groups are based on real human behavior rather than implied data. Although some groups may be similar to more traditional demographics, this will not always be the case, allowing for a more targeted campaign.

Once you have audience groups, cognitive technology can be used to redesign a message depending on which group an individual belongs to. This means the message is entirely based on their actual behavior, helping to better create a connection and see improved results.

Learn more: Use Real-Time Personalization to Create Dynamic, Relevant Experiences

4. Increases return on investment (ROI)

By using AI and advanced consumer behavior technologies, marketers can better understand their customers' motivations and preferences in real time, which enables them to create effective personalized advertising campaigns and optimize them for better performance. This means that marketers can avoid spending too much on a campaign that's doomed to fail and identify opportunities for improvement early on. In turn, this will improve engagement and move your audience down the sales funnel smoothly, which will lead to a higher ROI for your business in the long run. By leveraging this revolutionary approach, marketers can also build powerful and long-lasting relationships with their customers.

From a content perspective, cognitive marketing enables marketers to target the right audience with the right message, in the right format, at the right time. This helps them create and repurpose content according to what their audience responds to the most in order to create personalized experiences. Additionally, it also helps to identify which channels are most effective and which ones aren't, so companies can focus their efforts on the ones that drive the most value.

5. Increased brand loyalty

Modern consumers, especially Gen Z-ers, are now becoming stricter with what brands they choose to buy from and which brands they're willing to support and advocate for. And when companies display messages that hit the right notes with their consumers, they can foster greater brand loyalty. Cognitive advertising uses data science to create a stronger bond between the brand and its target market. When users feel that powerful bond, they are more likely to stick with that brand.

Cognitive marketing from a B2B perspective

Cognitive marketing is becoming crucial in B2B marketing, and although B2B customers usually go through different logical stages before purchasing a product or service, they'll still be influenced by biases and emotions. In fact, 95% of B2B decision-making happens in the subconscious mind. It's also important to take into account that the human mind is complex, and the final decision to purchase a product in a B2B context is influenced by more than one individual, with each giving their own opinion on how to proceed. This is why B2B marketers are taking more and more from the approach of B2C marketers in pushing a buyer's emotional barriers.

Learn more: Translating B2C Expectations into B2B Experiences