Why data can help marketers survive and thrive in a recession
LiveRamp’s Asia Pacific chief operating officer, Melanie Hoptman, writes that while marketers are gearing up for a tough year ahead, there are some data-driven strategies to stay resilient in challenging economic times.
As we edge ever closer towards a potential recession, marketers and brands need to stay ahead of the curve to protect their business.
With digital transformation fully underway, data has become one of the most important corporate currencies, and may be the difference-maker in helping you to stay afloat in a recessionary environment.
Here are four tips on how businesses can use data to not only survive but also thrive under recessionary pressures.
1. Spend smarter
In times of tight budgets, trimming marketing spend can be tempting, but doing so is a mistake.
Rather than shutting off advertising – and risk losing market share to competitors – maximise what you already have by leveraging your first-party data more effectively, through people-based marketing. Use addressable strategies across digital, search, mobile and programmatic to analyse and justify marketing spend. Beyond increasing advertising’s effectiveness, addressability enables every dollar to be accountable and measurable, which will prove critical as budgets tighten.
2. Gear up for not only a recession, but a cookie-apocalypse
With consumers also tightening the grip on their wallets, targeted advertising will be key to protecting sales. But with nearly half of the internet cookieless already, reaching consumers effectively can be difficult unless you’ve already embraced cookieless solutions.
Companies should be building campaigns on authenticated solutions that leverage people-based identifiers, in order to improve audience building, targeting, and measurement. These solutions enable advertising on the cookieless internet, which includes major browsers like Safari, as well as reaching consumers without mobile ad identifiers.
3. Collaborate to unlock new revenue streams
First-party data is one of a company’s strongest assets, but it can only go so far. To get a true, 360-degree view of customers and understand who new and prospective consumers are “outside the four walls” of their business, companies need to collaborate with partners.
Data collaboration allows for two or more enterprises to combine their data to unlock new insights about their customers. These strategic partnerships are often pursued between a retailer and supplier, brand and publisher, or even internally between CIOs and CMOs. Such strategic partnerships allow partners to collaborate to identify new customers, strengthen campaign planning, and improve analytics and measurement to increase revenue – all in a secure and privacy-first way.
Data collaboration has helped to enable the huge rise in retail media networks over the past year. But whether the data collaboration is within teams in your own organisation, or with external partners, it can help your business protect, or even increase revenue in tougher times.
4. Measure and stay flexible
As mentioned, the potential reduction in marketing budgets puts an increased importance on being able to measure outcomes and marketing success. However, what marketers may not realise is that they’ve become over-reliant on outdated tools and partial solutions.
Marketers need to be able to justify every ad dollar by pointing to measurement that ties to real-world results, like in-store transactions and online conversions. In turn, what this requires is people-based marketing, to better enable omnichannel marketing and connect marketing campaigns to outcomes. Data collaboration is key to making this happen, as this can bring brands closer to retailers, who hold the closest relationships with consumers.
Melanie Hoptman is the Asia Pacific chief operating officer at LiveRamp.
