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If we could sneak into the marketing offices of any company, we’d probably find that the most debated topic in recent years is the same everywhere: privacy.
GDPR, cookies, Analytics, tracking, and dashboards are essential for building strategies and allocating budgets in a data-driven manner. However, in today’s marketing landscape, they also represent the closest thing to Dante’s dark forest: a tangled, complex jungle that regulations and summer bugs certainly don’t help to clear up.
And even though it’s recently been announced that the “Cookie Apocalypse” isn’t coming (Google is set to launch a new privacy solution), browsers like Safari, Edge, and Firefox have already implemented the deprecation of third-party cookies.
We know the result. Digital analysts and marketing specialists are thrown into confusion, BigQuery and Matomo spike in Google Trends, lawyers go into “continuous training” mode, and there’s always so much—too much—confusion.
Let’s set aside, just for a moment, the costs for installing Google Tag Manager Server-Side and the mental gymnastics required to convince our legal department to ease up on the policies. Instead, let’s focus on the cornerstones that will guide us in managing our acquisition and lead generation strategies.
No secrets, no rocket science. Our foundations remain the same as always: thought, planning, practice.
So, let’s get to the point: how do we tackle yet another—and certainly not the last—major chapter of the digital world?
Too often, we don’t know what the marketing budget is. This means not knowing how much a lead should cost, what return to expect from a trade show, what the average ticket size is, or the acquisition cost of a new customer and which channels can reach them. Defining a budget allocation means having clear objectives and methods; it’s a crucial planning exercise.
People don’t live by social media alone. Editorial plans, content sponsorship, and PPC campaigns are important steps, but they are a means, not a strategy. Before advertising, there needs to be clarity in the briefs and objectives, knowledge of the competitive market, mapping of the customer journey, and definition of the brand and its products and services’ positioning. Before starting, we need to ask ourselves: do we have a brand manual? Are the brand identity, tone of voice, communication guidelines, and strategic positioning map alive, clear, and well-defined?
How many truly know their customers’ average ticket size or the duration of their purchase process and the touchpoints involved? These knowledge elements are often relegated to mere formalities, but without them, the choice of activities to implement becomes arbitrary—for instance, deciding to act on latent or explicit demand, using inbound or outbound marketing actions. Let’s get ahead of the game: study, analyze, and interpret.
Content, distribution, targeting, and more content: content is king, distribution is queen, but also, every company is a media company. Curate your content and distribute it using a mix of Paid, Earned, Shared & Owned media. If paid channels don’t allow you to reach specific profiling for your target audience, use contextual targeting to publish your ads on relevant websites based on selected keywords or topics. While behavioral targeting depends on cookies, this trick lets you reach the desired audience through the website’s content, without technological limitations.
After years of continuous and increasing investment in PPC campaigns, the natural consequence is that the auctions have become increasingly crowded and costly. We find ourselves jostling to grab the attention of the same audience niches because everyone wants those in-market segments ready to boost our campaigns’ ROAS. But who remembers to invest in the brand? Who actually allocates a budget to build long-term memorability?
If it’s becoming harder to leverage third-party data, we can still nourish company databases to create a truly strategic asset. This translates into activities often overlooked, such as updating the privacy policy and consents for commercial communications on company properties, as well as acquiring leads through events, webinars, and value-added activities. But then, we need to make real sense of this data: raise your hand if you’ve already implemented a method to analyze your customers, segment them, value them, and map their purchasing behavior. Not forgetting, of course, the evolution of tracking tools, the previously mentioned Server-Side GTM, Matomo, or Piwik.
If many data points and setups remain obscure, we must learn to understand the tools and platforms we rely on. After years when the trend seemed to be to rely almost blindly on algorithms, automatic bidding models, and the AI of Meta and Google, we must rethink how to face an increasingly complex reality. It’s no longer enough to hire a programmer and a social media manager; we need to consider bringing in well-defined professionals: a Digital Analytics Expert, a Meta Specialist, a Web Tracking Manager, just to name a few. Because, as they say, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” That was it, right?
Lastly, there are four friends who will always be there, watching us as we scramble between the latest update and that new trend we need to study: product, price, place, promotion. Remember them, right?
