Marketing Strategies For A Post-Cookie World

The Brave New World of Marketing

Marketing technology, or martech, has evolved rapidly in the past decade. The introduction of a massive volume of customer data has allowed companies to create more personalized advertising and communications with customers.

Yet at the same time, the technology and regulation landscape is evolving more rapidly than ever before, requiring marketers to keep up and pivot their strategies in order to stay competitive – and compliant. Marketers no longer have the only seat at the table when it comes to deciding how to manage consumer data. In today’s world, marketers must collaborate with compliance and data architect teams to identify the best strategies for doing so while simultaneously meeting each department’s (sometimes competing) goals. These teams can no longer work in silos and must be cohesive in their approach to managing and using data. At the end of the day, a marketer is charged with driving revenue. Yet as consumer attitudes and priorities around data and consent evolve marketers have had to pivot and remain flexible to ensure they are communicating the right messages compliantly to their potential customers – and ultimately hitting their revenue goals.

Consumers now care more than ever before about their privacy and the security of their data. In fact, recent research revealed that 72% of consumers will not do business with a company if they believe their privacy will not be protected, and 87% believe the U.S. should be doing more to protect consumer data privacy. Clearly, U.S. consumers believe companies and the government have a responsibility when it comes to protecting their data. Yet just as privacy is essential to the customer experience, personalization has also become a top priority. The same research study found that 42% of respondents said they are more likely to shop with a brand that offers a personalized experience. With both privacy and personalization more important than ever before, marketers must prepare themselves for a brave new world.

Looking Around The Corner to the Next Martech Transformation

There are several moving parts effecting how martech professionals will reach new customers in the coming years. The most significant upcoming transformation is the move to a cookieless world. The use of cookies to track would-be customers’ activity online is going away due to a confluence of factors including: Big tech’s shift to a “walled garden” approach to get ahead of regulations and build their data ecosystems. There is changing sentiment from consumers when it comes to cookie tracking. New privacy laws coming to the U.S. that mirror the U.K.’s stringent GDPR privacy regulations. Gartner’s Forecast Analysis: ‘CRM Marketing and Cross-CRM Software, Worldwide’ reported by 2026, third-party cookie deprecation will drive marketing and advertising software spend to increase by 10%. These transformations to the martech industry represent a pivotal moment in time for every company because they can choose to take this time to recalibrate their marketing approach or be forced into compliance without a strategy. Marketers who understand the changes occurring in adtech and can embrace new approaches will position themselves as leaders within their organizations and industries.

New Approaches To Marketing

Marketers should start planning now for the cookieless future. With Google set to phase out third-party cookies by 2024, marketers are now pivoting their strategies on how to gather information about their customers and potential prospects and most importantly doing so compliantly and recording consent.

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Reinvesting in First-Party Data

Strengthening first-party data collection via trust building will be essential in a post-cookie world.
Research shows that customers want to know more about what information is collected, and why – 95% of consumer recently surveyed said they believed individual brands and companies should be more responsible in their data privacy practices, and of those, 75% said they want more transparency on what data is collected and how it is used. Companies that update their consent approach to consistently and transparently communicate with their customers will not only get ahead of privacy laws, but they’ll also gain a competitive advantage by building trust with their customers before more transparency becomes mandatory. There are many intelligent ways marketers will seek to gather first-party data from potential customers, including by leveraging chatbots and artificial intelligence to gather insights about prospective customers using first-party data.

Aligning with the Big Five 

America’s five biggest tech companies hold the keys to America’s data. Marketers should understand the strategies of these companies when developing their own approach to reaching new customers in a cookieless future. One of the big five, Google, is developing a new approach to advertising dubbed Federated Learning of Cohorts, FloC. Once Google eradicates cookies, FloC will be a proposed browser standard that will enable “interest-based advertising on the web” without revealing individual browsing history and group people together called cohorts based on algorithms.  Companies should also learn to work within the constraints of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). With marketers no longer able to access IP addresses or open rates for email campaigns, marketers will need to refocus on communicating their product’s capabilities and content within their marketing materials. Traditional email marketing campaigns will need to focus on other call to actions within emails in order to motivate recipients and encourage them to participate in a company’s business, such as discounts, special offers, etc. In the near future, websites could also create new ways of tracking that we haven’t thought of yet.

Compliance: What Marketers Need to Know

Marketing teams should be honest about how they collect data and empower customers to decide what information they share. By doing so, they’ll have a leg up against competitors and can get ahead of privacy laws like those in Iowa, California and Colorado which are enabling more strict consumer protection regarding data privacy and the collection of data. Marketers who are transparent with their customers will find that customers are often willing to opt-in to data sharing if they trust the brand. Cassie’s research found that when companies operate with more transparency, 82% of consumers are more likely to opt-in for data sharing. Privacy laws in the U.S. will only continue to proliferate, especially as national security concerns like recent headlines on TikTok’s CEO going on trial add to the lawmakers concerns. The platform used by millions of users is accused of spreading disinformation and exposing US consumer data.

The ad-tech and marketing landscape is shifting and marketers need to be ready to adjust their strategies or they will be kept up at night thinking they should have moved faster. With each passing day, there is another law that passes in the US or a company being publicly taken to trial on their data policies. Websites and social media platforms have historically been the best way for marketers to collect third-party data, but now they need to explore other tactics. In a post-cookie world, it will be an arms race with adtech and marketers looking to capitalize on the most effective ways to respectfully gather customer data with consent and provide targeted personalized content. Marketers need to prepare now for the cookieless future – getting this right now will give them a privacy competitive weapon in when these updates are inacted. By gathering consent compliantly and ensuring there is a complete audit trail, marketers will lower the risk of not only financial costs due to class action lawsuits but reputational damage.

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