Leveraging Data Privacy Changes for Transparent Marketing
Digital technology has unlocked new possibilities and created opportunities that marketers of the past could never have imagined. One of the most significant advancements is the transformation in customer intelligence driven by digital data.
At one time, ‘knowing your customer’ was a matter of small-scale focus groups and pigeon-holing people into broad demographic categories. With the arrival of the internet, however, thanks to cookies and other forms of web tracking, businesses gained the ability to collect data about individuals and their online habits in minute detail and at industrial scales.
Safe to say, this revolutionised how marketing could be targeted and personalised.
But there was a murky side to it all. With tracking cookies lurking on every web page, many of them belonging to anonymous third-party advertising networks that had nothing to do with the website people were browsing, and no requirement to tell web users that their browsing habits were being monitored, questions started to be asked about whether all of this wasn’t a violation of people’s right to privacy.
We all know the rest. Since the EU’s passing of the GDPR in 2018, regulation of the collection and use of digital data has spread steadily around the world. It’s had a significant impact on marketing, sparking concerns about digital marketing becoming less precise, with less data available for targeting and personalisation, and more inefficient, with regulatory red tape eating up resources. The end result is squeezed budgets and a harder time demonstrating ROI.
Certainly, according to the trade body the Data & Marketing Association, 48% of small businesses believe the GDPR introduced unnecessary levels of bureaucracy, and 43% claim their marketing has been stunted by its rules. Yet 66% also agreed with the need to introduce data privacy regulations.
The counter-argument is that rather than being an understandable but limiting intervention, the data privacy agenda has, in fact, done the world of marketing a favour. Why? Because privacy regulations have forced marketers into complete transparency about how they use data. Having it all out in the open creates an opportunity to make marketing more customer-focused, engaging, and, therefore, more successful.
Taking a more transparent approach to marketing doesn’t mean a loss of data or customer insight. It simply means doing things in a different way. As a digital strategy agency, this is how we approach embracing more transparency in how we work.
Turning a challenge into an opportunity
Change itself can be challenging, and there’s no doubt that the privacy agenda requires marketers to change their relationship with customer data. For example, in lieu of the GDPR, third-party tracking cookies have effectively been consigned to the history books by major web browsers like Safari and Chrome, deciding to no longer support them.
The concern here, however, is less about the quality of the data that third-party cookies provide and more about convenience. Yes, the enormous market that grew in third-party data made targeting easy.
However, it didn’t give businesses and marketers direct access to much of the data circulating. Most of it was harvested and controlled by operators who simply sold access to their behaviour-tracking data in return for ad impressions. Businesses didn’t benefit from in-depth intelligence about their audiences. But there was a sense of complacency about this because it was easy to get targeted ads in front of people.
According to Hubspot, this dearth of insight into customers persists to this day. In a survey of marketers, it found that just 42% could say they knew their basic demographic information with confidence, while even fewer had access to secure intelligence about shopping habits, purchase history, and which channels they consume content/media on.
The message behind such findings is that marketers’ relationship with customer/audience data has long had a lot of room for improvement anyway. And through its insistence on transparency, the privacy agenda has forced the issue.
How to make marketing more transparent
So, what does a more transparent, privacy-first approach to marketing look like? There are three main ingredients:
First-party data
The first step towards making marketing transparent is switching focus away from anonymous third-party data collection to businesses gathering customer data for themselves – what is known as ‘first-party’ data.
The dominance of third-party methods of data tracking and collection arose from a time when these were technically difficult, specialist fields. But that’s no longer the case. There are dozens of ways businesses can gather data about their customers directly these days, from subscriber lists to social media interactions to loyalty schemes to encouraging feedback and reviews.
And it’s important to note that Google and Apple’s decisions to discontinue support for third-party cookies doesn’t mean all forms of web tracking are off the table. Businesses are still perfectly entitled to run cookies and collect browsing data on domains they own – just as long as they are upfront and clear about it, which leads onto the next two sections.
The key point about first-party data compared to the third-party free-for-alls of old are a) that businesses have full ownership of it, so get full insight into their customers from it, and b) it allows businesses to gather exactly the kind of information they want to know about their audiences. That makes first-party data high-quality, unique to you, and directly relevant to your business goals.
Full disclosure
First-party data must be accompanied by forging a new kind of contract with customers and target audiences. Simply put, secretive, undisclosed data collection broke a lot of people’s trust in online marketing. To fix that, brands need to be upfront and open about what they are doing and why. With buy-in from your audiences, you’ll also end up with richer, more complete information about them than you could get from hidden tracking cookies anyway.
Businesses shouldn’t think in terms of publishing privacy policies and flagging the use of cookies etc, just because data regulations now require them to. They should think in terms of their relationships with customers.
If you want to gather people’s data, tell them what you need, tell them why, and tell them how you intend to do it. Treating your audiences with dignity and respect in this way alone will secure greater buy-in.
Consent
The final ingredient in transparent marketing, and another reason why marketers have to take disclosure seriously, is user consent. This is another requirement of the GDPR – all data gathering has to be done with the explicit consent of the individual otherwise, it is considered in breach of the regulations.
But again, businesses should think less in terms of compliance and more in terms of what consent on data gathering means for your relationship with your customers. Seeking consent from people to use their data amounts to entering a partnership with them. It puts them on an equal footing in the arrangement.
The key principle to bear in mind here is that people are generally happy to exchange their personal information for something that benefits them. This serves as a highly effective filter for the kind of data you look to gather. The first question you should ask is, what’s the purpose of this data? What do I want to do with it? If the answer somehow relates to improving the customer experience, communicate the benefits clearly to people. Their buy-in and consent will come naturally.
If your objective is more business-focused, that’s fine, too. But you may have to think about how you can offer something to sweeten the deal as an incentive. For example, asking for consent to use contact details and tracking data to send targeted promotions might leave some people unsure. But if that request comes with an immediate new subscriber discount, more people will be happy to get on board.
Conclusion
Transparency about marketing activity and intentions can help build stronger relationships between brands and their audiences and repair the damage to trust caused by under-the-radar web tracking. People are happy to share information when they are kept in the loop and when they can see a benefit to them. By being transparent, businesses can collect better data directly from would-be customers than was ever available from third-party cookies anyway. And that, in turn, can lead to deeper understanding and better targeting.
As an experienced marketing strategy agency, Key Element can help your business successfully make the transition to a more transparent, privacy-compliant approach to marketing and ensure you achieve even better results from doing so. Get in touch with our team to find out more.
Matthew Cowell
