Data Fuels Your Marketing Machine

The digital marketing world is a forever fast pace changing environment. The need to adapt quickly in order to pivot where and when needed to keep business strategies and marketing campaigns on the right target is a constant. More so now during this endemic. It’s imperative for businesses and brands to understand how these data privacy changes may affect the bottom line if they don’t fine-tune and pivot their data strategy framework now.

For years in the world of digital marketing, advertising, media, and publishing companies have been using third-party data on behalf of brands to track and better understand the behavior of their customers. It’s mainly through the help of this third-party data that brands are able to create great customer experiences that grow revenue.

Let the Cookie Crumble

At a global level, 2021 was a great year for data privacy for most parts of the world. China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Australia have all implemented stricter data privacy laws. Following the lead of the EU who implemented GDPR (in 2018). Late to the party, North American countries, the United States, and Canada. As big tech platforms have incorporated stricter privacy features, lawmakers and politicians are quickly working on the legalities of writing new privacy laws.

However, from the looks of things in the U.S.A, data privacy changes is a top of the list priority and being fast-tracked as consumers demand more protection as to how data is “managed” and “regulated” on the internet is of high concern. Already 27 U.S states are holding congressional hearings hoping to pass stricter privacy laws before mid-year. Come April, at a Federal level, we will soon see the implementation of amendments to the “Act of the Protection of Personal Information” that will allow regulation for the processing of data will go into effect. Companies and brands may need to do slightly more than just check off the boxes to ensure consumers’ data privacy is correctly processed and protected.

The reality is entire business models are being reworked from processes, legal compliance, customer data strategies, and technology platforms. All preparing for a post cookie world. The best way to future-proof your business is by building a more actionable first-party data strategy framework today. Now is the opportunity to rethink, rework, and remap, what data sets are important to your business.

App Tracking Transparency

With the update iOS 14.5, the world was introduced to a more active App Tracking transparency policy. This allows you, the consumer, to choose whether an app can track your activity across its other companies/apps and websites for the purposes of advertising. This change in-app tracking transparency in an instant gave back to the consumer the control over their privacy. The consumer can now choose if they wanted to be tracked across websites and constantly sold to via advertisements. Giving power back to the consumer is changing the game for marketers. Apple has not only made changes that will impact data sharing across the iOS Apple operating system. Apple has also recently updated its email marketing policy and changed email forever as of the Apple iOS 15 update.

Marketing in a Cookie-Less World

The ending support of third-party tracking perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone at this point. Them going away will change what information companies have and how they market for their product or service. The end of third-party data is slated for 2023. You have a little time to start understanding what all this means for your audiences and how it will impact your analytics and attribution. Pivot accordingly.