“When first-party data is combined with third-party data about a users’ environment, it will give your marketing team… superpowers.”
In episode 73 of the Customers Who Click podcast, I had a great chat with Daniel McGaw about building your marketing tech stack, how to use data to help your customers in the best possible way, and why pro-privacy laws may just be scraping the bottom of the data barrel.
Internal teams find it hard to not get overwhelmed by modern marketing tech stacks. These tools have stiff competition and the tech continues to change at an incredible rate. Most tech stacks are nascent or aren’t configured properly. Their complexity can easily overwhelm marketing teams. The larger the organization, the more complexity is seen in its tech stack.
If done right, data is the key to understanding your customers in-depth so you can help create a better experience for them.
This episode covers the basics of first-party data and how to collect high-quality data through progressive profiling. Dan & I also discuss the dark side of marketing personalization by major brands. The episode shines the light on the weaknesses of data privacy laws. Finally, we also talk about how multi-billion-dollar organizations like Facebook, Google, and Apple are already finding a way to use these laws to profit from their customers.
Daniel McGaw is the CEO of McGaw.io, a marketing technology consulting company that advises other companies on their overall sales and marketing tech stack. His team also runs the utm.io tool to help process UTM data that feeds into a company’s analytics tool. He’s been in this business of data for over 20 years. He was also the Head of Marketing at KissMetrics.
You can connect with Daniel on LinkedIn, get his book “Build Cool Sh*t” for free on his website, or text “MARTECH” to (+1) 415-915-9011 to demo his team’s process for collecting data through progressive SMS profiling.
Key Highlights:
02:04 – 11:35 – Data is Fundamental to Marketing – When first-party data is combined with third-party data about users’ environments, it becomes the superpower of your marketing team. Maximize opportunities for all-party data collection from the customers to help create more accurate customer segments and to find new ways to target your products to those segments.
11:36 – 26:48 – Collecting High-Quality First-Party Data Through Progressive Profiling – Create a customized marketing tech stack where tools suit your needs AND can talk to each other. Add users’ profile attributes and actions they take (i.e. events in their profile) to get a clear picture of your data taxonomies. Progressively ask your email list/newsletter subscribers easy-to-answer customer-focused questions to fill in their profiles and their personal preferences. Subscribers will tag you as a fraud and quickly unsubscribe if they sense that you are trying to harvest their data which will violate their privacy.
26:49 – 31:42 – Why is Facebook’s Valuation at Almost $100B? – Facebook owns a lot of personal data of its users. Random quizzes we see on Facebook or other platforms seem fun but they are feeding into the data stream for data enrichment companies. Other uses of polls/quizzes include personality quizzes used in the pet food niche or questions around our behavior and habits around food that brands can use to find relevant products for us. If you can understand
your audience’s psychological drivers through your data, it makes selling a lot easier.
31:43 – 35:17 – Ways to Make Your Brand Look Creepy – Mistakes can be in the way marketers frame their questions which can make people uncomfortable to collect that data. The use of collected data can also get creepy. So it’s important to collect data in tiny steps through micro-commitments instead of collecting it all at once and defining boundaries for its use.
35:18 – 49:45 – Who Do Data Privacy Laws Actually Benefit? – Most brands collect your data to create a better experience; they’re only trying to help you. Privacy laws and their state-wise fragmentation do not do enough to mitigate the intrusion of privacy by brands that misuse that data for unethical purposes. Small and medium businesses do not have the resources to challenge these laws and mega-corporations can pay their way around the limitations enforced by these laws.
