The benefits and challenges of using customer data for marketing

Hi and welcome back to the last topic in this series from #TheBigMarketingBite

Its been a great to reach out to all our foodies, small food businesses and everyone else who has been tuning in every week and following us on instagram!

If it's your first visit (or you fancy a recap), so far we have covered Google Analytics, Big Data, SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Paid Advertising - all in the context of food!

Our final post is a very interesting and topical one - the benefits and challenges of using customer data for marketing.

In our blog post on Big Data, we talked about the fact that when we collect customer data and use it for digital marketing, we can create an improved customer experience. We can personalise what the customer sees e.g. in terms of suggestions and offers based on their interests and buying habits. 

In terms of email marketing, users who have subscribed are obviously interested in your product and so will find your communication useful and interesting.

Ultimately, this also benefits the business owner, because it is more likely this customer will make a purchase or other desired action. Also, it avoids wasting money advertising to people who have no interest in your product.

So win - win yeah? Well... it depends...

The big challenge with regards to collecting and using customers data is that you do it within the appropriate legal (and ethical) framework. This legal landscape is one that is constanty evolving. Most readers will be aware of GDPR. Basically this is a European-wide legal requirement with regard to how you collect, store and use customer data. Central to its requirements is the principle of the customer consenting to how their data is collected and used. As the digital marketing professional for your food business, its essential that you make yourself aware of your obligations under GDPR, as significant fines can be issued if you are non-compliant.

Related to the above is the use of cookies to collect data. You will be familiar with the pop up boxes that appear when you visit a website.These are used to obtain consent to collect your data - but who can really say that they actually ever read the full text of these pop ups? Or really knew what they were agreeing to?

A very significant case was taken recently by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties objecting to data being collected in this way. Their argument was that these consent pop-ups were basically a "legal veneer" and in reality, most users really had no real understanding of what they were consenting to (for example their data being shared or sold). 

Interestingly, the challenge was upheld by the European Data regulators:

"European Data protection authorities have said that pop-ups that appear on websites asking users to consent to data collection are in breach of GDPR rules and the data collected in this way must now be deleted" 

(Credit RTE News , Feburary 2022- You can read the full story here)

So the challenge for the marketing professional is clear, they must keep up to date with their legal obligations with regard to data and stay within the appropriate legal parameters.

These privacy concerns are also paramount for the big players in the marketing space, for example Googles Privacy Sandbox Initiave aims to replace and improve their technologies as regard. The video below explains further and is well worth a watch. (Credit: https://privacysandbox.com)

Again, the challenge for you, in marketing your food business, is keeping up to date with new technologies and learning new ways of doing things within this ever evolving landscape.

A final challenge for the marketing professional is avoiding serving too many ads, emails or other communications to the targeted consumer as this will have the opposite effect of what was intended. The customer experience will become negitive and they will not wish to do business with the brand. They will then unsubscribe, employ ad blockers, clear cookies and browse in incognito mode which will not serve the purposes of the company wishing to reach out to them.

My final word; the use of consumer data is an intersting one to write about because you need to consider it with both your customer and marketeers hat on... which dont always match!

I'll sign off now. I hope you enjoyed my final post.

Suzanne Mc Cabe