COVID19 has brought about major disruptions in the way people have traditionally lived, learned, and worked all over the world. As people were forced to move indoors, businesses have also had to move their operations to the cloud and double down on digital marketing to connect with their customers.
However, digital marketing in these times comes with its own set of challenges with the most notable being people’s growing concern over how companies collect, use, and share their data online. In fact, searches for “online privacy” have grown by over 50% globally from the last year.
But on the contrary, most techniques used by marketers to create audience lists and reach them don’t offer users any transparency or control.
Considering the tumultuous times that we are already living in, it has become more important than ever for businesses to forge meaningful connections with their customers. To that end, Google’s 2020 Marketing Playbook can help you navigate through the challenges of today’s environment and achieve desired outcomes while respecting and protecting your customers’ privacy.
Let’s take a look at the major highlights of this playbook.
1. Form Direct Relationships with Your Customers
As more people continue embracing new devices and technologies, there are are more opportunities than ever for businesses to connect with their customers directly. The information that these direct interactions fetch you are called first-party data, which is quite valuable as it is unique to your business and indicates the expectations that your customers have from you.
That’s why it’s necessary that you have your customers’ permission and tools to collect first-party data every time such interactions happen. Try incorporating a software development kit (SDK) to your mobile app that you’re using to gather information from people who engage with your app. However, any such efforts would yield results only if there is a direct engagement between you and your customers, which can be challenging if you connect with your customers via retailers.
But you can consider enlisting the help of data and digital media consultancies to establish a direct link with your clients. This is what consumer packaged goods company, Mondelez, did by teaming up with MightyHive.
Also, it would be wise to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that will help you organize all the gathered information offline. You can also use Google’s global site tag and Google Tag Manager for a first-party measurement solution to set cookies only when someone reaches your site.
2. Be Mindful of How You Reach Your Audience
While it is imperative for businesses to devise robust strategies for forging strong customer relationships, they must also be mindful of privacy legislations and customers’ expectations while deciding how they want to engage with them.
The way your customers interact with your app or site reveals a lot about their interests and preferences. Analyze the first-party data collected during your interactions with your customers so that you can better understand the type of ads they found meaningful.
You can use Google Analytics or Analytics 360 for analyzing data collected from your site to uncover insights that will help you engage with your audience more effectively. For example, online university, UTEL, used similar audiences to reach new students, which helped it boost its conversions by over 60%.
Moreover, you can use first-party data to consolidate relationships with your existing customers and finding new audiences who might be interested in what your business has to offer. Evaluating the information you have about your existing customers and leveraging it to look for people with similar characteristics or behaviours can be one way of doing it.
Another approach could be collaborating with partners who have a relationship with the same customers. For example, you can use the audience targeting tool, Customer Match, to reach the users who have provided both your business as well as Google with the same information. When you upload an encrypted data file of your customer’s information, Google can help you reach those people when they’re using Google’s services, while safeguarding their data at the same time.
For example, Customer Match, along with MightyHive, was successfully used by ISACA to invite inactive members to be a part of the association again.
3. Let Privacy be at the Centre of How You Use Data
After you’ve forged strong and direct relationships with your customers, it would be wise to use cloud technology for the organization and activation of data collected during those interactions. Marketers are increasingly using cloud-based solutions for data management while protecting user privacy because they offer inherent security and privacy advantages for storing and organizing large data sets.
Since first-party data can be gathered from across apps, campaigns, websites, and physical locations, you can combine all this information for better analysis. Moreover, you can also use cloud solutions to explore more advanced ways to analyze data and find new insights.
That is exactly what Domino’s did to combine different data points to serve their customers when they ordered again. It worked with its Google Marketing Partner, Bounteous, to combine data from different sources into Google Cloud’s data warehouse.
After storing and organizing all your data into a centralized cloud-based data warehouse, you can enlist the help of a data scientist for advanced analysis of the data. They can predict the outcomes of any future interactions that you have with your customers, which will subsequently help you take a call on which audience you want to reach and how much you want to spend in doing so.
If you want to form a better understanding of how your customers go from viewing ads to making purchases, you can use Ads Data Hub to combine sales data from your CRM systems or marketing database with Google campaign data.
Wrapping Up
The growing privacy-related concerns have triggered a series of changes that will transform the digital marketing industry significantly. Although working as a digital marketer may seem quite complicated these days, deploying privacy-centric strategies can help you accomplish your marketing goals.
In any case, Google has got it all figured out for you, which can help you achieve extraordinary results while respecting your customers’ privacy. If you want to delve deeper and form a detailed understanding of how you can go about doing that, here’s the link to the complete report.