Data and Privacy Challenges Most Marketers Are Still Faced With

From public to private, the customer experience has evolved over these years, and with the demise of third-party cookies, the privacy experience is leading the way ahead for customers as well as for organizations.

In the era of heightened data privacy concerns, building an efficient privacy experience that aligns equally with your business objectives, customer expectations, and legal regulations is challenging. It requires businesses to consider several factors because the entire digital ecosystem is lingering around consent and privacy.

Let us walk you through the emerging factors that pose a challenge while dealing with privacy concerns, but they also offer opportunities for enterprise-scale companies to craft a privacy strategy that sustains even during volatile times.

1. Making Privacy a Function

Companies over all these years have spent considerable about of time, money, and other resources to become privacy-compliant. Nevertheless, the ownership of such initiatives is being passed from one department to another. What started as a task for legal teams, gradually passed to the data and IT teams, and now, the baton is in the hands of marketing and sales teams, as they are primary generators and users of customer data.

Data breaches and privacy violations make up a small part of possible customer data privacy violations, some other functions at risk are violating data privacy laws while collecting, managing, processing, storing, using, and disposing of customer data.

All the internal stakeholders in an organization should work together to align and build a privacy-first organization. Data privacy should be an independent function that can drastically improve the chances of alignment. The scope of such a privacy function could be:

• Drafting a privacy strategy based on principles where privacy remains at the core of every process. Privacy should be considered at every stage of development.
• Demonstrating just and fair practices to gather, store, use, share, and dispose of data complying with the latest data privacy protocols.
• Building a privacy stack along with other organizational departments such as IT, data, marketing, sales, and other business functions.

2. Creating a Privacy Roadmap

Privacy is a complex and ever-evolving issue. While trying to operationalize privacy protocols, organizations must consider multiple stakeholders that use data to accomplish their tasks, for example, UX and product design, data science, marketing, sales, legal, HR, procurement, finance teams, and more.

Cross-functional collaboration works but it takes an approach beyond just partnering with all the departments. There needs to be an operational alignment with existing workflows, technical integration with multiple systems along with following legal compliance with a myriad of ever-changing laws.

A robust privacy roadmap must contain the design, plan, and implementation strategy that comply with the current laws and is agile enough to evolve with the changing needs of the business.

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 3. Omni-channel Data Collection

As third-party cookies come to an end, collecting data from different channels has become all the more challenging. However, the constant data storm is coming at a rapid pace in terms of frequency, volume, and diversity from a spiralling set of data channels, sources, platforms, and devices entails marketers are to struggle in controlling and streamlining data management workflows across all touchpoints.

Marketing leaders should address the problem of data deluge with innovative strategies. For generation and collection, we must focus on premium zero- and first-party data, and to reconcile customer data from several digital and physical sources for a seamless customer experience.

 4. Privacy and the Tech

Blockchain, generative AI, AR, and VR have made their way through all industries and sectors. Unfortunately, companies still do not have clarity on how to process the data collected or shared with these technologies following compliance and protocols.

Generating and utilizing data using AI has become a double-edged sword for marketing and sales teams. AI has offered intelligent automation, but it creates look-alike identities that may violate anyone’s privacy and security. Marketers must own the responsibility of how their model uses the data and control how to share it in the public domain.

5. Privacy Tech Stack

How do you create a privacy tech stack? An ideal tech stack is built around tools and technologies that run and grow on privacy-related initiatives like consent, compliance, and preference. While the martech and fintech tools in your ecosystem have certain privacy features, the privacy-first organizations should further invest in building an independent privacy tech stack to facilitate an advanced range of privacy use cases.

Wrapping Up

Coping with privacy concerns is becoming challenging day by day. The field is interconnected and evolving. Modern enterprises must strive to take it from a mere compliance task to a strategic initiative as their commitment to positive privacy experiences.

Addressing the challenges mentioned above can go a long way in creating a sustainable privacy strategy that can withstand the volatility in the market and offer a competitive edge to the brand over a long period.

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