For many marketers, the new year is often a time of reflection. Identifying what went right and wrong last year, reviewing practices and potential technologies that may help them move forward, as well starting to plan for the year ahead and beyond.
2022 will see a lot of changes around the use and management of data, especially when it comes to first-party data and privacy laws. We are also expecting to see an increased focus on marketing technology this year as predictive analytics becomes more of a priority for many. One thing we really hope happens this year is that marketers finally ditch the spreadsheets and get away from manual data wrangling (we can only hope)...
Data privacy
2022 is set to be a very big year for data privacy legislation. On top of a lot of new legislation being worked on across the globe and especially within the EU, there will also be a higher awareness of data protection authorities and individuals around GDRP violations. Over the course of the year expect to see an increase in the number of cases as well as greater PR and reputational impacts of those found guilty of breaches.
Over the next 12-18 months, the EU is set to finalize new legislation on political advertising, roll out the new Data Governance Act, which will include measures to increase trust in data sharing, the reuse of data held by the public sector and give greater control to Europeans over the use of their data. This will all impact the digital landscape significantly, stay tuned for more from Adverity throughout the year.
Importance of first-party data
One of the most important things for marketers this year will be first-party data due to the lack of cookies and third-party data available to them. This means that many marketers will need to go back to the basics of building a customer-first strategy, as well as adapting their practices around transparency and choice, as well as ensuring they are always adding value to their customers.
Personalization and audience building
Because of the lack of third-party data, personalized content and audience building will be a clear strategic focus for marketing in 2022. Content in the future is likely to have to work harder for businesses to gain access to customers’ zero and first-party data and creating a tailored and transparent value proposition is a good strategy for achieving this.
This will also cause a greater focus on campaign reporting so that marketers can truly understand their audiences and how their campaign is performing. In fact, according to our latest research, businesses that see themselves as very strong at campaign reporting, are on average 3 times as likely to be very strong at personalized content or audience building.
Manual data wrangling
Manual data wrangling will become a greater problem for marketers as the number of data rows increases. Our data shows this was a key challenge for marketers in 2021 and we expect this to become the number 1 priority for the majority of marketing departments to fix with automated data integration in 2022.
Currently, 42% of marketing data analysts cite this as a significant challenge rising to 51% of CTOs / CDOs. Expect this to grow further this year.
Predictive analytics
Throughout this year, predictive analytics will come more to the fore than ever before. According to our latest research, marketing teams already see the value of predictive analytics with almost two-thirds planning to implement predictive modeling this year.
However, before marketers can do this, they need to ensure that their data is fully accurate and integrated. Neither of these things can be achieved in a meaningful way without having a certain level of analytical maturing. Unfortunately, very few marketers have truly achieved analytical maturity and far too often marketing teams are still relying on manual data processes to get insights from their data.
