Visible’s CMO Cheryl Gresham on growing audiences—and attracting customers—in 2022

How will marketers and communicators achieve user growth in 2022?

Building audiences has always been a challenge, but in the current fractured media landscape finding your target audience is a crucial ability for organizations of all sizes. With the departure of third-party data and the increasing competition for eyeballs online, your message will have to work harder than ever to stand out.

That’s why opportunities like the metaverse are getting so much attention heading into the new year. Early adopters stand to see big benefits from capturing audiences that are still developing on new digital platforms.

It’s an exciting opportunity, according to Cheryl Gresham, the new CMO for Visible, a Verizon company. We caught up with her recently as she gets started in her new role where she joins from her previous role as U.S. head of marketing for TikTok. Here’s what she had to say about what’s next for creating scale and growth in 2022:

PR Daily: What are the biggest changes in media that must be tracked headed into 2022?

Gresham: As the metaverse grows and brands can partner/sell in the metaverse, how do we measure the impact? What do we learn from early adopters? What firms/agencies/brands will thrive? This is a really exciting time and evolving area to lean into and understand this new opportunity.

I find the area of balancing data and micro-targeting with mass awareness and growth really interesting. It seems like the pendulum has swung to one end and is swinging back a bit, especially with cookies being more and more limited. We’ll need to push for a universal solve to be able to better understand who we are reaching with our messaging and at what frequency, while also developing new strategies for growth and impact overall to support investment.

E-commerce evolving on “new” social platforms:  Which platforms will get it right/wrong and make it the most seamless for users to buy and stay within the platform, what products will thrive, will these customers behave differently than what we’ve seen in other e-commerce platforms in the past 10+ years?  We should all be thinking about this new space and if there is opportunity, testing and partnering to understand how it can drive our businesses.

PR Daily: What are your biggest lessons learned over the past year and why?

Plan B is the new Plan A.  Always have both, and ensure your teams, partners and executives are briefed and ready to go should you need to change direction quickly. Whether it’s the on-going pandemic, supply chain shortages, changing consumer habits, labor shortages or just the unpredictability of every part of everyone’s life right now, we need to plan for disruption and ensure our teams, and organizations at large, are set up to move quickly.

Fidelity to partners even through rough times can be better than seeking out new and unproven solutions.  There is so much flux happening in the world, I find that it can often be better to work through challenges with partnerships that need a tune up to get the results needed vs. throwing it all away and starting over. We have enough that is changing–invest the time to fix what isn’t working vs. seeking out new if you can.

PR Daily: What are the key ingredients for growth in 2022?

Gresham: User, user, user…Clearly know who your user/target/customer is and stay close to their needs today, while also planning for tomorrow’s needs.

Structures and frameworks that can bear fast change. Can you turn around creative in 48 hours to pivot to a new message?  Can you implement media in the same time period? Make sure you’re ready for responsive marketing.

Make sure your audience is not too small. While it’s nice to get a shot of the dopamine that comes from a digital conversion, make sure that you’re not following those metrics off a cliff.  Ensure the KPIs of your org aren’t so slanted so that you train behaviors that aren’t scalable for growth.

PR Daily: What are you most excited about for the year ahead?

Gresham: Meeting my new team and colleagues here at Visible!