4 Ways You Can Better Understand Your Target Audience While Protecting Their Privacy

Cold, hard cash and even crypto aren’t the only valuable currency in the digital age. Data is priceless. In the wrong hands, it can bankrupt individuals, governments, businesses, and institutions. Data makes the world go ‘round.

Marketing pros have always gathered data from their target audiences. They also cull information from their existing customers to hone those targets and script relevant messaging. However, when data collection was analog data, prospects and customers had to provide their consent. Not so in the digital world.

The amount of information you can glean from individuals’ digital footprints is massive. At first, you could take it all without permission. Then came requests for third-party cookies consent in annoying pop ups, ignored by many people. But because people started fighting back, those cookies are crumbling out of existence. Consumers demand privacy and security from hackers looking to cash in on their data and others using it in nefarious ways.

Of course, you need to learn everything you can about your target audience to develop successful marketing campaigns. But how can you mine their data while ensuring that you’re protecting their privacy? Here are four ways you can.

1. Ask Them to Volunteer Input

Third-party data certainly has its limitations. It allows you to see where people are going online. Then you attempt to extrapolate data to form conclusions. There’s nothing certain about what you’re gathering.

Wouldn’t it be better to get information straight from the consumer’s mouth? That’s the magic of zero party data. You engage with individual consumers, ask them directly for input, and use that information to better define your target audience.

Have conversations with consumers when they read your content or advertising. And when you have their permission, you can personalize your marketing efforts on a level unachievable with third-party data. Plus, you can span informed targeting across all your online platforms, including social media.

With zero party data, there’s no secret of the third-party cookie. You get honest responses directly from the source, with their permission and without raising privacy concerns. They’ll appreciate not feeling like big brother is watching.

2. Practice Complete Transparency

Most consumers’ beef with privacy is that they don’t know who’s using their data and how. Every company should have a carefully crafted privacy policy that gets into the weeds about how it uses consumer data.

Just having a privacy policy isn’t enough. You need to actually practice it from the top, down. Moreover, your policy should be revisited frequently and revised as needed. Revisions may be prompted by new consumer concerns and changing technology and data practices.

Be transparent with your data privacy policy. Put it front and center on your website and insert a link to it in relevant content. For example, if you’re asking consumers to rate their likelihood of purchasing a product, build in a link to that policy.

Your company probably has many policies, about data, environmental practices, product quality, and more. Operating with transparency is how you will build trust with consumers and stakeholders. And trust will build your bottom line.

3. Put Consumers in Charge

People prefer to be in control, especially when their personal information is involved. People also like to be empowered to make their own decisions. Wise companies will put their consumers in charge of their own data.

If you’re using zero party data, you’ve already obtained their consent to use the information they choose to share. And your transparent data privacy policy tells them how you will use it. However, that doesn’t mean consumers won’t change their minds later.

Make sure you give consumers an all-access pass to the data they’ve voluntarily provided to you. Make it easy for them to update privacy guardrails, contact information, and email, text, and marketing preferences. If they do update them, respond to requests immediately.

Your company may be just one news story about a new data hack away from consumers wanting to reconsider their privacy options. Make sure you’re letting them steer their own ship. It will make them trust your company more and keep them loyal.

4. Deploy AI

There is perhaps no better way to make sense of millions of data points today than by leveraging the power of AI. This technology excels at finding patterns, opportunities, trends, and tendencies in the data you collect. And that offers powerful insights when you’re developing your marketing strategies.

Let’s say you commit to protecting your audience’s privacy using zero party and first party data. Although you may be gleaning leaner albeit more qualitative information, that doesn’t mean you can manage the analysis by hand. AI can not only do the work, but do it much more quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

Coupling AI with the data you gather can drive the creation of relevant content that resonates with your target audience. It can help shape the knowledge base and language of your website chatbots. And it can help you craft the right questions to ask consumers when you want to engage with them across platforms.

AI is a powerful tool that can enable your ability to build more personal and productive relationships with your audience. If it’s not in your marketing toolbox in a post-cookie world, add it.

Be In the Know

After years of using data collected via third-party cookies, it can be worrisome to let them go. But doing so when you opt to keep consumer information private doesn’t shoot down your marketing efforts. On the contrary, your company’s commitment to permission and privacy can help them soar.