Post Cookie Era: How Marketing Managers Can Find and Use Valuable Data in the Company
The post-cookie era
The window is closing. So far, so-called 3rd party cookies have played a central role in digital marketing. Advertisers could use them to track the behaviour of online users and target them based on anonymised profiles: data-driven, automated and individualised. This also offered brands and providers an opportunity for more performance in addressing customers, for whom direct customer relationships are the exception because they sell their products via retailers. Now these 3rd party cookies are on the brink of extinction. Browser providers like Apple (Safari) and Mozilla (Firefox) already block them. In our estimation, they already no longer play a decisive role: at this year's d3con, it was discussed why 3rd party cookies can only be set in a small proportion of browser actions.
Marketers are confused about how to dig up their valuable data
What to do? How can marketers adapt to this challenge and improve marketing performance? The main problem is to get (new) customer information systematically and continuously. But there is also a second problem: customer data already available in the company must be consolidated, enriched and used in campaigns. This data is usually "trapped" in different silos, such as IT or customer relationship management systems, and not linked to each other.
Moreover, they often need to be completed and processed in a form which they could be used to activate customers. So: marketers are sitting on a treasure trove of data and don't know how to use it. It's like grandma's attic: it's full of things, and you need to learn how to go about sifting through and utilising it all.
Marketing already has many customer data that is valuable to the company. It needs to be used properly.
Yet that is precisely what would be necessary. In other words: brands need a consumer data strategy! This defines how they build, manage and monetise direct relationships with consumers. Proprietary customer data - i.e. customer data that a company owns and not publicly available, such as data on buying behaviour, preferences and interactions - has value, but this only becomes apparent in operational development and application.
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It is necessary to develop a uniform target catalogue for data and attributes that enables a complete view of the customer - we at diconium call this the "Golden Record". This brings data into a coherent structure and facilitates its use in analyses and campaigns.
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This poses a challenge for consumer goods manufacturers, particularly at the beginning: how can they enrich data records from CRM and IT with the help of additional attributes and data sources and transfer them into addressable customer profiles? As described above, the cookie is no longer a source of information. So how does the enrichment work?
We have developed a so-called Consumer Data Suite for this purpose. This makes it possible to describe neutral campaign patterns for the qualitative and quantitative development of customer profiles with the help of playbooks - as white-label solutions, so to speak, which are oriented towards the unique features of different industries. The focus is on the 4-A approach: acquisition - authentication – enrichment, and activation.
Four A's for better marketing performance
1. Acquisition: Marketers need access to customer data. In other words, customers must provide them with the data. The first step in the 4 A's describes different strategies for gaining customers' consent to use their data.
2. Authentication: Many brands still have a large base of anonymised customer information obtained via third-party cookies. If these are not to become worthless at some point, they urgently need to be converted into addressable consumer data. The second step explains how 3rd-party and first-party data are merged in a way that complies with data protection regulations to turn anonymised users into users with an ID and address who have consented to use the data.
3. Augmentation: The prerequisite for the third step is that marketers define a target record for their data. This means they must determine what information they need about customers to efficiently and effectively conduct marketing campaigns. Based on this target record, they developed an approach to collect further information and prepare it to be activated in marketing.
4. Activation: Now we have a complete and well-prepared data set. The fourth step describes strategies for how brands use their data successfully. In doing so, they pursue three goals: To increase the value of existing customers and customer loyalty, attract new customers, and increase the impact and performance of marketing campaigns.
This 4-A approach by diconium helps marketers to expand and improve the basis for data-driven marketing with proven measures. It is the first step in building a comprehensive target customer data set, the "golden record". 4-A prepares the solution for essential questions in the post-cookie space: What do new marketing tactics look like? How can existing cookie data be converted into profiles? How can providers build addressable user profiles? How can these be used in campaigns? And last but not least: How can the success of marketing be measured based on customer data?
Curious?
