Updating Your Digital Marketing Best Practices in the Age of Online Privacy
Updated: Nov 22, 2021
There are an increasing number of regulations and policies, such as Apple's new IOS 14.5 update, that are making consumer’s digital data more private. This is a good thing for consumers who should be in charge of their digital information as well as other personal information. However, it presents a new challenge to small businesses in general: people's data cannot be tracked on apps and websites if they don’t want their data being tracked. Lots of small businesses rely on tracking data, but there are ways to work around this.
Before getting into how to react and deal with the new privacy updates, here are some definitions:
First-party cookies are pieces of data that are stored on the user's computer. First-party cookies are set by the website.
Comparatively, third-party cookies are set by a third party. Third-party cookies are more specific about the information maintained about the individual. This causes people to feel uncomfortable and become concerned about their data privacy, which is not the feeling people want to feel when on an app or website.
SEO (search engine optimization) is improving your website traffic and its visibility on search engines.
Even though these privacy regulations and policies may seem impossible to overcome in terms of growing and marketing your business, there are ways to get through it and pivot your strategy accordingly.
Make a Page on Your Website to Tell People How You Collect Data
When you make a page on your website dedicated to how your website collects data, it demonstrates to your customers and prospects that you care about their data. It also helps to build trust. The more transparent you are about how your website collects data, the more your customers will trust you.
If you know how much traffic your website or social media is getting, you can pivot. If you need to put more keywords in your articles or blog posts, you can do that. If you do not know how well your content is performing, you will not know what you need to tweak (or possibly change completely). That also means that you will not be able to quickly adapt to what is popular.
Have a Broader Term Audience Strategy
When you focus on gaining a broader audience it makes it easier to grow. When marketers target gaining an audience from a select group of people it does not allow them to recognize all the other potential followers they could gain.
Review Cross-Channel Performance
Reviewing cross-channel performance allows you to see what is and is not working on your various social media platforms. Content that is not working on Facebook that would work better on LinkedIn could be moved to LinkedIn. Reviewing cross-channel performance also allows you to keep up with trends. And people these days on social media want to follow companies that keep up with the ever-changing trends.
The new privacy regulations and policies have hit some businesses hard, but the good news is that there are ways to get through it. Be sure to contact us if you’d like more help in navigating these challenging waters!