Data Trends for Marketers

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Christopher Penn 0:29

In today’s episode, Johnny asks, what’s the next data trend to impact marketing teams? Well, here’s the thing.

There’s a lot that we know is coming down the pike in terms of data privacy, right data privacy, privacy, safe machine learning, privacy, safe data collection, and such that is absolutely going to impact marketers now, whether marketers and marketing teams know this or not.

That is the big question.

The laws have been passed, some have taken effect already, many are on their way.

For example, the biggest one is California’s CPRA, which will take effect January 1 2023.

One of the big, big changes in this law compared to CCPA, which was passed and went into effect in 2020, is that CCPA said, companies above a certain size, may not sell consumer data without consent without permission.

The CPRA changes that to say, sell or share.

So if you were doing a webinar, say with with my company Trust Insights, and in the past, we’d come to an agreement that we would co brand this and such, and I administered it, I wouldn’t be able to share that data with you, I would not be able to share that data with you, unless the consumer had opted in to having the data being shared, right.

And so that changes a lot of how companies, especially B2B companies do their work.

Right? Because instead of being able to share data, now, you have to obtain consent.

And from a consumer perspective, right, you and I are consumers makes total sense.

I prefer that as a consumer that you asked me for my permission before you go sharing my data with somebody, regardless of whether money changes hands or not, that data is still valuable.

And so the big data trend that we as marketers need to be paying attention to for the next two to five years is privacy safe data collection, what data you’re collecting.

More important, what are you doing with the data? If you’re collecting all this information, and you never act on it? Why Why bother? Right? Why collected unused data is a financial waste because it costs money to store it, it costs money to audit it, it costs money to process it.

It is a security risk is massive security risk, right? unused data, is just waiting for somebody to break in and steal it, the less you have to steal, the less liability you have, right? If you are collecting, you know, first and last and date of birth and social security number and home address and home phone number.

But all you ever do is email people get rid of everything else except the email address.

You’re not using it, you’re not making good decisions with it.

One of the things that I think is really important for marketers to think about is of the data that you do have, how much of it is predictive? So let’s say you have somebody’s postal code, right? You’re collecting postal code, zip code in the USA postal code in other parts of the world.

If you apply data science to that, that feature among all the other features in your data set, what predictive power does it have? Does it tell you the propensity of somebody to make a purchase, right, if somebody from a certain zip code has a higher propensity to purchase and others and that’s useful information.

On the other hand, if you run a sophisticated statistical analysis, and you find that there is no predictive power in that piece of data, stop collecting it, just turn it off because it’s not helping you write same with somebody, you know, home address.

If that information does not help you predict the business outcome you care about, stop collecting it, it’s not helping, on the other hand, keep the things that do have predictive power.

And that is not I wouldn’t call that a trend.

I would call that a best practice.

Do that analysis to figure out what data has predictive power and what data does not all of the information you collect, and know the information you store Other data trends, right now, I would say probably one of the largest ones that people are still in the very beginning stages of is actually harnessing artificial intelligence for marketing purposes.

Many software vendors are, are doing it, but marketers themselves are not because of time of cost.

And, frankly, because the outputs may not necessarily make a whole lot of sense.

And so

Christopher Penn 5:30

I would say that in the next two to five years, marketers, particularly the larger companies, you know, enterprises will have to start using artificial intelligence, if they want to be able to unlock the value of all this data that they collected.

It’s like, data is an ingredient, right? And we’ve been collecting data for years and years and years.

It’s like having a pantry, our basement full of of ingredients.

And we don’t really cook with them, right? We just collect and collect and collect.

That’s not helpful, right? Whereas if we start to use AI to process that data to reduce it to make it actionable, that’s where advantage lays that’s where that’s where the good stuff is.

So whether or not that is an actual trend, I don’t know.

But that is the direction people need to go if they want to make use of the data they have and make better decisions.

So really good question on data trends when it comes to marketing.

Thanks for asking.