Thank you to Lighter Capital for co-hosting our recent webinar. Dustin Bruzenak, Modern Logic CEO, served as a moderator for a panel of marketing experts: Carrie Waite, Assistant VP of Strategic Partnerships for Pets Best, with previous experience as a senior marketing manager; Eileen Hansen, Director in Digital Experience at Valera, with extensive experience in B2B technology marketing; and Nate Champion, Chief Growth Officer at Banner Commerce and the founder of LookBack. They provided their feedback on how new changes to privacy laws impact marketers.
Brush Up Your Fundamentals
Nate Champion: There’s a lot of talk like Facebook limiting data collection after the IOS 14 release. There are companies that have just given up on it. They simply think it doesn’t work anymore, and they won’t do it.
More and more, it’s been important to have foundations, running a system asking “What are our KPIs? What are we looking for every week? How are we blending down our acquisition costs?” In this environment, you have to become comfortable with ambiguity and make the most of non-paid so you don’t have to rely so heavily on these page channels, where there’s a lack of information. Are we collecting leads at a higher rate? Are we doing everything we can to convert those leads into buyers, and not having to go pay to advertise them on Facebook?
It’s changed some of the tactics. Facebook, for example, used to have effective targeting when you defined your audience. Now, what I’ve seen better, is to go broad with your audience and tailor your creative to be intentional. For example, to reach new moms, I’ll create a set that’s targeted towards messaging convenience for the product, let the algorithm do its thing, and uncover who the creative is really resonating with. Then you scale the ones that work and turn off the ones that don’t. You no longer can get as targeted upfront as you used to be.
Increase First Party Data Collection
Eileen Hansen: As a publicly traded company our lawyers are really nice and conservative and protective of the company, because you know, there have been some massive lawsuits and in this space. As we get compliant with GDPR and CCP, we’re forecasting the loss of 70% of data in all the European countries. It’s incumbent upon businesses now to start embracing this idea of collecting as much first party data as possible with good opt-in experiences.
It’s an interesting thing to keep track of the server side tracking solutions that are on the horizon.
Chrome and IOS are getting rid of browser based cookies. In the next couple of years, I think we’ll see more adoption of those server side technologies.
Use What You Have
Dustin Bruzenak: Your ability to gather metrics on the person is much more limited than it used to be. However, if they are using your app, if you can figure out a way to do attribution and connect them to your front end, you have usage data which is incredibly valuable and can be very deep.
You know, maybe we can’t get as much info to Facebook, but if you’re in our app, we can certainly watch what you’re doing and gather anonymous data about general cohorting data and so on. There are ways around it, but I think we’re going to see more narrowing of what people are willing to give us rather than less, especially as attention spans get flatter and flatter.
We’ll have to find creative ways to help us fill in the picture.
Nate Champion: Truly data driven marketers are best equipped for this new world. Historically, a “data driven marketer” was someone who would talk about A/B testing an email subject line. Today, that’s someone who can make meaning out of raw data merged with platform data.
It’s a matter of comfort with working with data and a desire to uncover the truth, at all costs, plus to translate that to marketing.