Engaging your target audience in the post-cookie world is not as simple as just switching out one ad platform for another. Marketers must capture first-party data, leverage high-quality third-party data, and engage with their audiences more deeply through creative tactics and immersive omnichannel experiences.
Key Takeaways
- Listening to your audience and filtering through the noise is more profitable than spraying and praying in a “numbers game.”
- Creating delightful, frictionless experiences for your audience will improve opt-in rates for first-party information gathering.
- Stay up-to-date on GDPR and Privacy Law, and adapt your systems to comply with real-time changes in opt-in, and opt-out statuses.
- Improve engagement by collaborating directly with your audience to identify and solve problems instead of sharing information at a distance
Listen to Your Audience
Don’t settle for a “spray and pray” outbound marketing strategy, resulting in irrelevant messages flooding inboxes or irrelevant direct messages on social media. Instead, listen to your audiences.
Even if your product is a logical fit, most potential customers won’t spare you the light of day if their first impression of your brand is spam. To avoid damaging your brand’s reputation, filter quality audiences and “listen” to what they care about.
Start by thinking about business-to-business (B2B) more as business-to-people (B2P).
The NetWise Identity Graph enables a more people-centric approach to marketing. By blending B2B and B2C identifiers, you can now listen more closely to generate better buyer insights, create more accurate audiences, and deploy them more consistently across channel. And when combined with Dun & Bradstreet data and the RevUp platform, we further optimize your audience targeting and ABM strategies.
Our best-in-class platform makes it easy to send refreshing messages at the right time to the right people and not only showcase your brand in the best light possible but also enhance it in your audience’s eyes. The NetWise ID Graph can help almost every marketer in the world improve their campaign efficacy and efficiency. Marketing rocket fuel, anyone?
Creating Delightful Experiences
If you want to engage your target audience in the post-cookie world, make your opt-in experiences delightful. Deliver value upfront and earn someone’s interest instead of gating valuable content and resources. Make it easy for people to engage with your brand, and if your message is relevant to their life, they’ll gravitate your way.
For example, in the post-cookie world, eliminate “email capture” from your vocabulary as a marketer. Instead of treating your audience like targets to be captured, treat them like your friends and community. Design opt-in experiences that feel less like “being captured” and more like an epic win.
The first opt-in is EVERYTHING when building customer relationships. If you make people feel good upfront, they won’t think twice about opting in and staying with your brand when competitors come knocking. Remember, people will opt-in because they are enthusiastic about benefiting from the delightful experiences you provide, again and again.
Your job isn’t done once you create a delightful opt-in experience. Listen regularly and seek feedback early to measure your audience’s delight while you improve experiences continuously.
Rigorously Eliminate Friction
Creating compelling messages and reasons for people to visit your website is half the battle. As a marketer, you know converting impressions to clicks and clicks into opt-ins is unbelievably difficult. While you provide foundational, delightful experiences in the post-cookie world, you also need to eliminate friction points your audience may encounter along their journey.
There’s a high barrier to entry for many traditional opt-in tactics, such as email exchange for newsletters, downloadable guides, and mailing lists.
Consumers are cautious about sharing their emails. To engage your target audience in the post-cookie world, be creative and provide differentiated opt-in experiences if you want to gain a person’s email or other valuable information. Creativity can also be considered weird or different—but at least you will stand out.
For example, we created a Data is Dope street team for industry events. From the tees to the NFTs, community members couldn’t resist engaging us for more info about what we do—and how they can associate with us.
Offer Multiple Signup and Login Options
Explore diversifying your signup or login options or create a game out of the opt-in experience. Consider implementing new technologies like embeddable magic links from Stytch, and seek out other secure ways to make signup experiences frictionless and easy.
Allowing people to simply signup or log in with an account they’re already using is a step toward becoming frictionless. As a marketer, you need to know where your audience is most active and may already have logged-in credentials. These logins can include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Discord, GitHub, GitLab, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Slack, as well as Web3 logins, like Ethereum and Solana.
Depending on your audience, you should aim to implement a simple solution like Google’s One Tap, which can present a one-click opt-in experience within the flow of a person’s journey. Your goal should be to create an opt-in experience that doesn’t even require a jarring thought, much less a click.
Ensure Compliance with GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive
While creating a delightful, frictionless opt-in experience is essential, don’t forget to be transparent and upfront about how you will use people’s information.
Before the adoption of GDPR, marketers generally attempted to comply with the ePrivacy Directive’s consent requirement through a consent banner that notified their audience that the site deployed cookies and provided a link to an opt-out mechanism.
You need to stay updated with the latest privacy laws related to cookies and the collection, tracking, and sharing of personal information.
According to BakerHostetler, advertisers should consider the following:
- receive consent from the user before cookies are used (except for strictly necessary cookies)
- disclose accurate information regarding the data each cookie tracks, as well as its purpose before consent is attained,
- document and store user consent,
- allow users access to the platform even if consent to use cookies is denied, and
- provide an easy method to withdraw consent that was previously given
Take time to understand the current legal and regulatory cookie landscape and the underlying technologies. The most sophisticated marketers are already preparing to create integrated systems for updating their users’ opt-in and opt-out information in real-time.
Prioritize Collaboration Over Transaction
Instead of creating a barrier between you and your audience, start crowd surfing. Jump into your audience. They will catch you if your approach is friendly, collaborative and non-transactional.
In the post-cookie world, consider designing marketing campaigns to humbly ask for volunteers, contributions, and upfront collaboration to solve problems with your audience.
This concept may seem counter-intuitive, as much of B2B marketing is spearheaded by “thought leadership,” which involves positioning a brand as out-in-front of its audience.
Kahana is a company that executed an unconventional email marketing campaign that leveraged Dun & Bradstreet’s data-inspired approach and platform. The marketing strategy included contacting a select audience of business founders across multiple industries via email and asking for help in crowdsourcing a hub of valuable resources to be distributed to students, entrepreneurs, and other founders.
When this campaign launched, the email open rate skyrocketed, and all parties received enthusiastic responses expressing the collaboration’s refreshing approach that “cut through their inbox.”
Not only did the campaign lead to immediate opt-ins and engagement, but it led to partnerships and new opportunities for cross-promotion.
How Everyone Wins in the Post-Cookie World
If you want to prepare for the post-cookie world, you’ve come to the right place. We help you design and execute data-driven marketing strategies.
You can leverage our robust pool of 3rd-party contacts, including hashed emails, and from there, you can filter and segment based on your audience. In a nutshell, this enables you to roll out precise and sophisticated omnichannel campaigns with touch points across all the online platforms where your people love to be.
You can also take advantage of the CDP embedded in D&B Rev.Up ABX, which ingests and unifies first- and third-party data and incorporates advanced modeling to create and prioritize audiences, giving you greater confidence that you’re reaching the right people.
In addition, our open architecture enables you to seamlessly send those audiences to your existing salestech, martech, and adtech platforms. So if you’re ready to emerge victorious and start winning in the post-cookie world, we’ll help you reach your audience and make it happen.
Want to get started using NetWise for your Data-Driven Marketing?
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