Surviving the Digital Marketing Storm: Navigating Recession, Privacy and Disruptive Innovation

Let’s face it, we’ve hit a stormy period for marketing. Rising inflation, supply chain disruption and a looming global recession is affecting brands and consumers alike, with both tightening their grasp on the purse strings.

On top of this, marketers now need to implement more privacy-centric marketing and prepare for the deprecation of third-party cookies – requiring a complete overhaul of their current strategies to ensure they are future-ready.

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This period, however, is also laced with the opportunity to inject more creativity, disruption, and innovation into our marketing strategies than we have done before. So long as we meet the storm head on and deal with it appropriately.

Doing more with less

The economic crisis is causing a significant emphasis to be placed on efficiency and smart investments which, in turn, is driving a shift towards analytics and attribution to ensure money is being spent wisely and is driving the biggest business impact.

Fortunately, digitalization has helped those in marketing identify where spending is wasted or, at least, how effective the actions that they’ve spent their money on are.

To ensure your messaging isn’t going unnoticed, or having a negative effect on your brand, requires data that shows what resonates with your audience. For this to be actionable, you need a proper techstack and a solid understanding of analytics, so that you can interpret and operationalize the learnings – or, alternatively, you could partner with a marketing agency that can do this for you.

Privacy and first-party data

As the depreciation of third-party cookies and the sunsetting of universal analytics edges ever closer, advertisers will need to develop new privacy-first, first-party data strategies to fill the gaps.

To develop these, they need to be offer value to their consumers, in order for them to want to hand over their data, and will need to be transparent on how that data will be used going forward.

Brands ought to be running small, regular value exchanges to curate a consistent and up-to-date profile of its customers, and should consider adopting future-facing data strategies – such as progressive profiling and continual first-party data enrichment.

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Traditional marketing rises again

While digital marketing is no doubt here to stay, omnichannel marketing and hybrid strategies are also likely to become more commonplace again, owing to the decline in measurability that will come alongside the increased focus on privacy.

As consumer consumption continues to rise, brands should start injecting digital qualities into traditional marketing methods, so as to be ‘always on’ and in front of their customers. It has become more important than ever to reach consumers with the right message, at the right time and aligning digital strategies with other marketing platforms will help companies continue to do so.

A future of challenge and opportunity

While there are no doubt challenges for marketers to overcome, there is also a great deal of opportunity. Economic uncertainty is driving efficiency, and privacy-centric marketing will help brands reconnect and re-establish trust with their audience.

By focusing on their customers, first-party data strategies and the revised use of other marketing platforms, brands can weather the storm and use it to their advantage, driving growth over the years to come.