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Marketers can no longer count on everyone being willing to share their data. More people are pulling back, blocking what a company can see or limiting what they can collect. Marketers are no longer dictating what they can and should do with their marketing initiatives. As marketers think about the types of campaigns they want to run, they must realize that only certain campaigns will apply to certain individuals due to their reliance on different levels of data needed to execute each campaign.
Forrester analysts identified five types of data individuals in their annual US Consumer Privacy Segmentation report. At one end of the Forrester Data personality scale are “reckless rebels,” people who aren’t concerned about privacy and are willing to share almost anything and everything. Historically, Brand treated everyone like a reckless rebel.
Next is “conditional consumers,” a privacy-conscious group who love to shop and are likely to use ad blockers but will give up information for incentives such as loyalty programs.
The “data-savvy digital” persona that resembles the conditional consumer falls right in the middle, but these people don’t share information based on incentives. According to Forrester, this group and conditional consumerists should be very important to marketers because they make most household purchasing decisions.
At the other end of the data person scale are the “nervous unawares,” who are the least tech-savvy and want to protect themselves but don’t know how. And, finally, there are the “skeptical perfectionists,” who trust a small number of companies and actively limit their data sharing, according to Forrester’s report.
While it may seem disappointing for customers to fall into the middle or bottom sharing categories, marketers should focus on graduating these individuals into more freely data-sharing groups by being good stewards of data. What makes a company a good data custodian depends on how the data is being used. Is it beneficial and timely or is the company making irrelevant or creepy offers? Many consumers get frustrated when their inbox gets spammed with marketing emails. The goal—provided someone is willing to share the data with you—is to toe the line between being helpful and aggressive and trying not to stumble over it.
What does it look like if you are trying to make changes to your strategy based on this information? The approaches may look different for each person, but there is one constant you will see in them all: Relying on third-party solutions (eg, data, cookies or technology) should not be part of the strategy going forward. Third-party data and the cookies underpinning that data are no longer as valuable as they once were. This means that brands need to make better use of the data coming from their own digital channels to build personas, target new and existing customers and, ultimately, create a strategy to change the old approach to advertising. Build better data pipelines.
Let’s start with “reckless rebels” and “conditional consumers”. When these two individuals are on your websites and apps, they are much more likely to share data with you. So, at a very high level, you can assume that you have your entire marketing arsenal at work from a strategic perspective. However, there is one element that must be considered: trust. If you try too hard, or become too persistent in your messaging or too blunt in your personalization, you risk turning them into a split personality. This is often an important element that is forgotten, as from brand to brand a consumer can take on a different personality as a result of their previous interactions.
In between, we have the “data-savvy digital,” and these individuals are going to be more sensitive to the data you use as a marketer. They are likely to choose somewhere between opt-in and opt-out, and if they share data with you, they expect it to create some value for them. While this is typically associated with loyalty programs and the like, they tend to be more objective in what they share, and their expectations of how you use their information can be compared to other brand interactions they’ve had. Can You would not want to track these individuals on the Internet or using normal communication. Although you don’t need to interact with these individuals one-on-one all the time, you will want to be objective and data-driven in how you group them with others. They’ll also be more open to in-session personalization on your websites and apps to help you out.
Last, and embodying the least number of options for marketers, are the last two personas: the “nervous unafraid” and the “skeptical protectionist.” There’s an old saying that rings true for people in this mindset: Context is important. Prior to automation, programmatic bidding and so on, the focus was on contextual relevancy. This is the key for these individuals. Focus on the interactions they have on your websites and apps, accept the fact that you won’t have much visibility into who they are or what they’ve done in the past and only into their behavior and the content they’re interacting with Apply machine learning. Use it to generate value for both the brand and the consumer. In some circles, this is referred to as “no-party data” and solutions that use it would be a good choice to provide a balance between privacy and personalization that may resonate with these individuals.
Marketers need to come up with solutions for each data persona because all of them, regardless of how they feel about data sharing and privacy, expect a good digital experience. At the end of the day, if you want to maintain that relationship with consumers, it comes down to respect and compliance.
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