You Ask, I Answer: Data Trends for Marketers?

In today's episode, Shawnee 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, a privacy-safe machine learning, privacy-safe data collection, and such that uh 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 uh CPRA, uh, which would take effect January first, 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 uh above a certain size may not sell consumer data without consent, without permission. The CPRA changes that to say uh sell or share. I would not be able to share that data with you unless the consumer had opted into 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 uh being able to just share data now, you have to obtain consent. And from a consumer perspective, right? You and I are consumers, uh, makes total sense. I prefer that as a consumer that you ask 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 are you 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? Why collect it? Unused data is a financial waste because it costs money to store it, uh, it costs money to audit it, it costs money to process it. Um it is a security risk, a 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 uh 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 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 than others, then that's useful information. On the other hand, if you run uh 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, right? Same with somebody's 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, uh 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. Of the information you collect and of the information you store. Other data trends right now, I would say probably one of the largest ones that people are still at the very beginning stages of is actually harnessing artificial intelligence for marketing purposes.

Many software vendors are you are doing it, but marketers themselves are not because of time, of cost, um, and frankly, because the outputs may not necessarily make a whole lot of sense. And so I would say that in the next two to five years, marketers, particularly at the larger companies, you know, enterprises, uh, will have to start using artificial intelligence if they want to be able to unlock the value of all this data that they've collected. It's like data's an ingredient, right? And we've been collecting data for years and years and years. It's like having a pantry or a basement full 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 uh data trends when it comes to marketing. Thanks for asking.