Secure Data Collaboration Is Central to Agile Marketing in the New Data Economy

In recent years, the scope of the traditional CMO role has broadened significantly to include new responsibilities around privacy risk mitigation, regulatory compliance and customer engagement. The changing job specs of a CMO 2.0 have added to the normal stresses associated with trying to lower customer acquisition costs and improve retention rates.

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In today’s hyper-competitive, highly mobilized and digital online markets, the most savvy CMOs recognize that they can’t rely solely on internal business data to effectively execute an agile marketing growth strategy. They need to develop a multi-dimensional understanding of their audience — informed by a steady flow of up-to-date, domain-specific insights from external sources. Fresh data points can augment their own proprietary customer data, bridge internal knowledge gaps around user behaviour and strengthen profiling capabilities.

These highly coveted, actionable data points have always been out in the ether, but remained under lock and key — undisclosed, unsubstantiated, and unattainable to second parties. However, if accessed via secure, regulatory-compliant data collaboration, these insights can empower decision-makers to develop a more acute understanding of their customers, as well as the scale and make-up of their market. Put simply, externally-enriched data, achieved through secure data collaborations, can make a tangible difference in helping CMOs absorb a growing list of responsibilities.

The Paradigm Shift for Insight Gains

Until relatively recently, this type of cross-organizational data collaboration was off-limits for enterprises due to tightening regulatory constraints, consumer privacy trends and inherent business sensitivities. So what has changed? Most notably, innovations in Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) have emerged at an opportune time, in parallel to the evolving data privacy landscape. PET solutions are particularly well-suited to address the core privacy challenges confronting enterprises in the new data economy — providing unique opportunities for companies to leverage their business relationships for greater monetary and strategic gain.

The benefits of cross-organizational collaboration can today be realized by companies operating in the same ecosystem, which means previously cordoned-off revenue-generating opportunities are fair game. By using cryptographic techniques to validate sensitive data, while keeping all underlying data fully private, business partners can now become mutual sources of invaluable data enrichment to drive joint ROI. At a more granular level, this means that:

Companies can safely and securely discover overlapping customers without exposing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or compromising compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

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Businesses can validate the potential of a data collaboration before embarking on any phase of technology-led joint insight discovery.

When the viability of potential collaboration is established, both parties will be poised to better understand their mutually addressable market.

With better data insights, both parties will be able to upsell jointly active customers, mobilize lapsed accounts, and crucially, onboard new users in a much more streamlined and cost-efficient manner.

Once mutual customers have been identified in a cryptographically-secure fashion, companies can selectively exchange insights to segment overlapping users and share new data points around consumer behavior. With a broader market awareness, CMOs can strengthen customer profiling capabilities and run customized promotions with finely-tuned incentive schemes.

In parallel, partner companies can simultaneously run referral campaigns targeting non-overlapping clients.

Future-Proof Growth Strategies With Tech Innovations

As Gartner predicts that 65% of the global population will be protected under data privacy laws by 2023, and half of companies will adopt PET by 2025, CMOs should feel compelled to front-run strategic technology trends, and take advantage of the innovative solutions currently permeating the market. By doing so, they can engage in unprecedented sharing of customer insights to elevate their partnerships and uphold full compliance with data privacy laws.

With marketers actively looking at ways to develop a stronger playbook for success, data-driven collaborations take on a more pronounced importance — as highlighted by McKinsey — and should form the bedrock of companies’ growth strategies. As adaptability and marketing agility become more intrinsically linked to revenue growth, CMOs who lean on PET innovations to complement internal data with external data points will be uniquely positioned to thrive in the new data economy.

Bottom line: without continuous external data layering, internal data assets will only take companies, and CMOs, so far. Entering into this new paradigm requires a perspective shift, but one that will ultimately yield higher ROI, strengthen partnership synergies, and inform more customer-centric decision making.