Top data trends for marketers to watch and stay ahead of the curve

There’s no denying the importance of understanding the future of data. According to Tom Wilde, the CEO of Indico Data, “The reality is that every company in the world now is a data company. I don’t care if you’re a trucking business, pharmaceutical, or insurer. You are a data company, whether you like it or not. The extent to which you get a handle on your data will play a huge part in your competitiveness in the future.”

Here are five top data trends for marketers to watch and take advantage of in 2022:

1. BUILD A ZERO- AND FIRST-PARTY DATA STRATEGY

The elimination of third-party identifiers will change marketing—in many ways for the better. As the shift away from cookies happens, direct engagements with customers will increase in importance. Zero- and first-party data is information a company collects directly from its prospects and customers and owns (also known as 1PD or 0 or 1P Data).

First-party data complements and enhances other data types and can reduce the reliance on others. Whether your company has created a first-party data strategy or not, use 2022 as an opportunity to identify gaps and opportunities in the customer or consumer experience where data can be gathered and used to help make your marketing more effective.

2. RETHINK YOUR MARKETING TECHNOLOGY

Along with re-evaluating first-party data strategies, it’s essential to look at your marketing technology stack to determine if it meets current needs. A key focus internally should be, “If we knew X, we could do Y.” The MarTech stack must be aligned with the business to help make sense of all consumer and customer interactions.

A persistent, unified customer database that enables campaign orchestration across the MarTech stack is becoming more and more critical. Customer data platforms are becoming increasingly prominent to provide a single customer view. According to MarTech, CDPs “collect customer data from all sources, normalize it and build unique, unified profiles of each individual customer. The result is a persistent, unified customer database that shares data with other marketing technology systems.” The global CDP market is expected to grow from $1.42 billion in 2022 to $6.94 billion by 2029 at a compound annual growth rate of 25.4% in the forecast period.

3. DATA PROTECTION WITH ZERO-TRUST

In our personal and professional lives, trust is everything. The adage of “trust but verify” is outdated regarding data protection. Today’s world, with data hosted in the cloud across various platforms and services, is super complex. Zero trust is an emerging term that operates under the assumption that no one—and nothing—can be trusted as a default. While that might sound cynical to some, zero trust’s time has come.

According to AT&T, zero trust “is a security framework requiring all users, whether in or outside the organization’s network, to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated for security configuration and posture before being granted or keeping access to applications and data.” The adoption of this framework has increased. According to a 2021 report from Okta, 78% of companies worldwide said that zero trust has increased in priority. In 2020, 41% of companies were working on a zero-trust initiative—a number that skyrocketed to nearly 90% in 2021.

4. ALGORITHMS FOR EVERYTHING

Algorithms can be super complicated, but they don’t need to be. The best definition comes from the author Yuval Noah Harari. According to him, an algorithm is a “methodical set of steps used to make calculations, resolve problems, and reach decisions.” He claims that algorithms are arguably the most critical concept in our world.

Custom algorithms for digital ad targeting and programmatic bidding have been around for a few years now, but as marketers consume more and more data and have additional tools to control how it’s used, this method has evolved and is becoming more popular. There are many ways to build algorithms and it’s up to marketers to test out what works, what doesn’t work, and the best implementation strategies to see results.

5. THE DEATH OF EMAIL HAS BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED

It seems as if headlines tout the death of email almost every year. But the data speaks for itself: No channel even comes close to email’s potential reach and engagement. In 2021, over 4 billion people around the world used email. Experts expect that number to grow as high as 4.6 billion by 2025. Email has a 90.3% penetration rate among U.S. internet users. And, in 2019, the average ROI was $42 for every dollar spent on email marketing, according to the DMA.

Email is an essential channel for communication between brands and their key audiences; it builds a relationship and drives sales. However, email is changing. Brands are leaning into more interactive formats, such as kinetic emails. Brands also leverage email to build more robust zero- and first-party data by including surveys and quick questions over time (also known as declared data).

It’s no doubt that 2021 was a challenging year for marketing, but it also opened the doorway to new data-driven strategies with a mission to help marketers perform better by delivering consumers exactly what they’re looking for. Data continues to become even more available—even with new privacy restrictions from tech giants—so it’s imperative for marketers to understand what new and improved tools and strategies can be helpful, no matter what the year brings.

CEO of Response Media, a data-led CRM agency that helps leading brands to achieve optimal growth between brands and their customers.