Valuable partner marketing skills are at risk of being lost as the structure of channel marketing teams continues to shift, according to research from Coterie.

Revealed at the firm’s Coterie Connect event in London, The 2025 Partner Marketing Skills Report was conducted in collaboration with Sapio Research and covers trends, gaps, and opportunities across the industry.

As partner and field marketing teams are increasingly being merged, the data revealed that just 15% of partner marketers are now working in fully independent teams.

This, the study warned, appears to be diluting the specialist skills required to run effective partner marketing programs and reducing these blended teams’ confidence in their own abilities.

According to Coterie, urgent investment in training and development is required to prevent the channel losing the expertise crucial to driving future growth, with company co-founder Jo Dunkley describing the research as a “wake-up call” for businesses.

“We’re seeing partner marketers in integrated teams feeling less confident in their ability to succeed, and that should raise alarm bells,” she said, adding that the shift is being driven by a mix of budget pressure and misunderstanding.

“Many C-level executives assume that partner marketing can just piggyback on field marketing efforts, using the same content, campaigns, and creative,” Dunkley added.

“And because teams often share martech systems, there’s a belief that combining roles will create efficiency. But what’s being lost are the specialist skills that actually make partner marketing work.”

Coterie said attendees at its Connect event echoed the concerns surrounding the trend, agreeing that CMOs and senior executives must act to protect partner marketing skills to aid long-term channel performance.

Future skills

The report also delved into other areas such as marketing budgets, spending patterns, and strategic priorities, and highlighted the skills partner marketers see as crucial for success over the next five years.

At the top of the list, MarTech and digital marketing are viewed as the most important for both the future and the current industry landscape, while AI and automation has climbed up the list into second since last years’ data, up from 15% to 27%.

Rounding out the top three, data and analytics capabilities was found to have doubled from 12% to 27%.

“Senior executives place a lot of value on data and the certainty that data provides,” commented Helen Curtis, fellow co-founder of Coterie Connect. “By using AI, data and analytics, channel marketers can better demonstrate ROI, something that could finally secure the budget increases that partner marketing has long needed.”

Training

As the presence of AI continues to gather pace, the research revealed that partner marketers still feel unprepared for the industry-wide shift.

Respondents ranked the technology as the number one priority area in which they need training for success by 2030, followed by strategic thinking, and data and analytics skills.

While traditional communications and negotiation skills have dropped down the list of perceived importance, Coterie revealed that adaptability has rocketed up the list, from being one of the lowest ranked areas to being one of the six most critical skills for future success.

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Digital automation and energy management specialist Schneider Electric has launched its first Ecommerce Partner Program to support overall growth and collaboration for partners.

The new initiative provides access to an e-commerce transformation and activation manager, a dedicated Schneider Electric specialist to help with strategy development, alongside access to the latest industry updates, news, and events. 

There’s also a range of comprehensive training courses on offer, covering topics such as company, product, e-commerce, and sustainability, which Schneider said will help partners keep ahead of the competition. 

Additionally, the program features a range of compensation options. These include marketing funds, rebates, and sell-out initiatives to help partners make the most of their e-commerce investments. 

“The mission of our partner program has become clearer,” said David Terry, vice president of IT channels, Europe at Schneider Electric. 

“For the first time, we are offering our e-commerce partners a program which is unique and innovative that sets it apart from its competitors.”

He highlighted the initiative’s comprehensive suite of tools and resources aimed at helping partners “succeed in the e-commerce space”.

“From marketing support to technical assistance, the program offers a wide range of services to ensure partners have the best experience possible,” he added. 

“The program also offers exclusive discounts and promotions to help partners maximize their profits. 

“With its comprehensive features and the ability to customize the program to fit the needs of each partner, the Ecommerce Partner Program is truly ahead of its competitors.”

The move follows Schneider’s 2022 revamp of the mySchneider IT Partner Program, which saw the company overhaul its structure in response to feedback from its partner community. 

The refreshed initiative introduced a simplified and more streamlined framework that features specializations for key sectors – including data centers, software, and services – with the aim of catering to more specializations over time.

Back then, Rob McKernan, SVP of Schneider Electric Europe’s Secure Power division, highlighted the importance of strengthening relationships as one of the most effective ways to drive growth.

“By listening to our partners and designing the program to accommodate both new market trends and changing business models, we can help them to fast-track new sales opportunities and build the partnerships of the future,” he said.  

It’s close to just three months since Elon Musk took the helm at Twitter, and his tenure has been rocky, to say the least. His first month in charge saw mass layoffs, a new revenue stream that led to widespread impersonation, and the CEO at one point even locking the doors of the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

Twitter, as a result, is being sued by former workers amid complaints about the quality of the service rising, reporting cash flow issues, and brands weighing up whether or not to be active on the platform at all. An impersonation of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, for example, caused its stock price to tumble, after a fake account with a paid-for blue tick said it would provide free insulin. The rocky start has also thrown advertising spend – Twitter’s main source of income – into doubt, with large companies withholding cash due to the rising instability.

The rise of social media was once seen as a new dawn for communications and marketing, giving brands the tools and channels to reach customers directly. Turbulence at Twitter, alongside ups and downs at platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, though, means brands might need to examine how to evolve beyond social media for good.

Economic chaos and an unpredictable future

The shake-up of Twitter and its policies, particularly around content moderation and free speech has caused brands to reconsider their position on advertising through the platform, says Madeleine Sampson, telecommunications, media and technology analyst at Fitch Solutions.

“Companies such as General Motors, Audi, VW, and Pfizer have all paused advertising on the platform and have adopted a 'wait and see' approach,” she says. “Apple has reportedly cut its advertising spending on Twitter, receiving considerable public criticism from Elon Musk, and brands risk criticism for ending their association with 'free speech' or pursuing a ‘woke agenda’.

“All of this comes at a time when brands are already reining back their marketing spending due to inflation and the rise in operating expenses. Therefore, big tech is suffering significantly from the fall in advertising demand over the course of the year.”

Economic conditions don’t help the advertising business Twitter relies on, and neither does Musk’s erratic management style, nor the deteriorating quality of the platform. Users have reported the platform might crash completely, and anyone that says they can predict what will happen in the future is – as Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir says – “full of it".

“I think a lot of CMOs have been pulling their hair out over the past month as they try to figure out what's happening next,” she says. “We are seeing a number of challenges for brands and marketers as they think about how to reach customers. Twitter is one piece of that, and concerns about Twitter are part of it.

“But we also have to think about what's happening with cookie deprecation, and the other challenges marketers have trying to reach this goal of being able to create one-on-one, personalised experiences for customers.

“In the short term, certainly we're seeing budgets be pulled back for Twitter, but we're also seeing companies surveying the other tools and technologies out there to help them understand what value they may get from Twitter versus other sources.”

Brands are falling out of love with social media

The question for brands could reasonably shift from debating how much of a presence to have on platforms like Twitter – to them asking whether it’s worth having a presence at all on popular social media platforms, given the risks. It’s especially true given the old adage of businesses craving long-term certainty.

One of the many roles Twitter plays is to serve as a contact point for frustrated customers. When all else fails, after being driven around in circles by chatbots or spending half an hour on the phone, calling out brands on Twitter is a regular occurrence.

Add to this the problem of the Twitter pile-on, in which swathes of users rally against a brand or person, and businesses might feel they’re between a rock and a hard place. However, Chris Bignell, founder of XL Communications, says a coherent communications strategy could avoid this, and that businesses are called out because people feel like they have nowhere else to go.

“It's very easy for brands to get called out on Twitter, and I think that's why the public has kind of jumped on it because it's a way of publicly shaming a company,” he says. “But I think most people turn to Twitter because they get a response. That’s led to corporations moving their call centre staff to Twitter, rather than answering phones, which means that by publicly shaming a company, the customer is probably more likely to get a quicker result.

What comes after social media?

As Bignell alludes to, the challenge with Twitter at the moment is not just down to the way that it’s run, but in maintaining the ways brands rely on it to communicate with customers directly. Wetteman says joining up the channels of communications, whether over email, phone, social media, or through their own website, would help alleviate the reliance they have on Twitter. Many brands have more to learn when it comes to customer interaction, she adds.

“There's a lot of interaction that happens before a ‘one-to-one’ communication, and some of the really interesting and innovative stuff that I'm seeing is around using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand, not just when a customer creates that one on one communication, but what happens way before that,” she continues. “Businesses want to understand what customers search, their activity on community sites, their activity on the website, to get a better understanding of what they need to do to make a customer happy, rather than just what their interaction may be with a chatbot.”

As brands look away from social media, the question of what comes next still looms – whether it’s another dominant social media platform or Twitter alternative, or something entirely different, like a metaverse-based experience.

Things don’t look like they’ll improve for Twitter any time soon. As Sampson points out, a pause on advertising is not good for Twitter’s profitability, on top of a user base that could fall. “Around 90% of Twitter revenues come from advertising, but the introduction of the Twitter Blue subscription service, as an attempt to build new revenue streams, could see advertising take a back seat and become less relevant to advertisers over the long-term,” she says. “Musk stated he wants to create 'the most respected advertising platform in the world', but it’s too early to say what the result of Musk’s overhaul will have on the number of Twitter users, which is one reason why some companies are biding their time before making a final decision.”

Business communications firm Twilio has launched a number of new features for its Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to help businesses build stronger relationships with customers.

Unveiled at the company’s Signal conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the first announcement was that Twilio Engage is now generally available.

Twilio Engage is a marketing tool that’s been in the market since October 2021 and it allows marketers to use real-time data to improve tasks such as delivering advertisements to customers, making them more effective.

Speaking at Signal, Ivy Grant, VP strategy and operations at Twilio said most marketers currently rely on user data that’s old and doesn’t represent what the customer is looking for at any given moment.

Twilio is marketing Engage as an “omnichannel growth platform” that’s built on top of a customer data platform (CDP) such as Segment.

Using data from a CDP, Twilio Engage can inform a marketer about what a potential customer is wanting to shop for and at what times they usually shop during the day, allowing businesses to serve highly targeted ads at the most opportune times to increase the likelihood of making a sale.

The platform aims to reduce the amount of wasted advertising businesses run, citing the rising cost of serving ads as macroeconomic headwinds continue to adversely impact business’ bottom lines.

Twilio said Domino’s Mexico has already used Twilio engage to stop sending generic marketing campaigns and pivot to a more targeted approach.

This led to a 700% increase in return on ad spend and a 65% reduction in customer acquisition cost, Grant said.

Twilio also announced a new, faster way to authenticate customer logins, eliminating the “friction” involved with steps such as entering one-time passcodes (OTP) and completing CAPTCHA tests.

The company has partnered with more than 56 mobile network operators (MNOs) across more than 30 countries to launch silent network authentication (SNA) for Twilio Verify.

SNA is a possession authentication method that Twilio said is immune to social engineering efforts.

It involves users entering their mobile number to log into their account and then the service checks with the mobile carrier that the SIM used in the device is neither spoofed nor cloned, permitting an authenticated login.

It hopes customer experience (CX) will improve as times to complete login processes will be cut significantly.

One Twilio partner, Indonesia-based Gojek - a ride share, delivery, and shopping app - was able to cut user login times from 20 seconds down to 5 seconds using SNA.

The last major upgrade to Twilio’s CEP was the company’s partnership with Google Cloud to bring a native integration between Google Dialogflow CX and Twilio Voice.

The partnership sees Google’s contact centre AI integrated with Twilio’s voice call platform and aims to improve the automated customer call centre experience.

Twilio Voice customers can now program machines to handle basic tasks without the need to engage human customer support agents.

For example, a travel agency could program Twilio Voice to be able to handle requests like checking flight times using just the AI-powered chat assistant.

Andrew Moore, VP Google and director at Google Cloud AI said the company’s technology allows customers to have more realistic conversations with customers, expressing real human emotion.

He also said experiences won’t require customers to over-enunciate words just because they’re talking to a machine. It aims to improve customer conversations because the advanced AI makes the customer more relaxed, he added.

The AI can also be engaged in real time if a human agent is required to support a case. If a support agent takes a call, Twilio Voice will be able to pull relevant information to the customer’s case on the agent’s screen based on what the customer is saying on the call.

Twilio said this allows businesses to focus more on building relationships and takes away little jobs that can get in the way of focusing on the customer interaction itself.

The new announcements are all framed around the idea of improving the CX so businesses can retain customers in the face of macroeconomic uncertainty.

Twilio’s CEO Jeffo Lawson said it’s more costly to acquire a new customer than ever thanks to rising ad prices, budget constraints, and new cookie laws.

The company said it believes it’s more important now to focus on keeping customers and to do that, businesses need to improve the CX.

When businesses can retain customers, they can further develop the lifetime value (LTV) of that customer, offsetting the cost to acquire customers (CAC).

Lawson said a business’ success in the current economic climate can be determined by how it maximises LTV and minimises CAC, and that’s a measure of how durable a business is in the long term.

The announcement that Chrome would stop supporting third-party cookies sent shock waves across the digital marketing community, especially those who’ve relied upon this data to target their messages at defined audiences.

Google has already announced it intends to begin the rollout of the Privacy Sandbox Initiative to developers in late 2022, with the phase-out of third-party cookies pencilled in for the end of next year. Essentially, the move would see individual data points from users grouped into what Google calls 'cohorts,’ which marketers would use to target their messages. This attempts to shift the emphasis away from profiling individual users using third-party cookies, in favour of tapping into the swelling public opinion around digital privacy.

Google’s proposals haven’t come without controversy, however, with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) intervening earlier this year and extracting a set of commitments from the tech giant. The regulator was particularly concerned about user privacy as well as the impact the Privacy Sandbox could have on publishers and the wider digital advertising market.

Indeed, Google has a stranglehold over the industry, with Chrome holding 64% of the browser market, according to Statcounter. Any significant changes made to the platform, therefore, will affect swathes of consumers and businesses alike. Given the direction of travel as the cookie phase-out continues, marketers must become far more creative and attentive to user privacy and personal data.

Cookies might be doing more harm than good

The frustration users feel, especially when accessing commercial online services, is often a lack of control over the personal data they must relinquish to buy into something or access a service. GDPR was supposed to give power back to users, who are now asked for their explicit permission before their information can be used. There's also a level of transparency, but intrusive third-party cookies, which track users’ digital footprints, remain an active part of the ecosystem.

Neel Pandya, CEO of Europe and APAC, Pixis, succinctly tells IT Pro: "The demise of cookies does not mean the demise of marketing. It simply means the marketing landscape is now ripe for further tech disruption, and the protocols for this disruption are clear – it has to be privacy first.”

Trustworthiness (83%), integrity (79%) and honesty (77%) are the key emotional elements consumers feel most align with their favourite brands, according to Deloitte Digital. The persistence of cookies has arguably undermined these principles, but will Google's move to ban them deliver the trust and transparency consumers crave?

Lior Charka, VP of product at Outbrain, agrees the kind of marketing messages that will need to be created post-cookie must be different: "Business marketing teams must recognise this, consequently making smart adjustments to their marketing mix to prioritise the delivery of engaging and relevant advertising experiences for users without using their personal data.”

Brute force use of consumer data to define marketing messages needs to be replaced with what's been called 'consent-driven engagement'. Suppose the data companies and marketers have relied upon disappears. In that case, they need to replace this information to maintain the commercial relationships they have spent, in some cases, high levels of resources to obtain. Shifting to more efficiently using first-party cookies, though, may benefit businesses as this strategy would require much closer direct connections with customers.

“Research from our Deloitte Global Marketing Trends 2022 report found that more than 60% of high-growth brands are shifting to a first-party data strategy compared to just over half of low-growth and 40% for negative-growth companies", William Grobel, director in Deloitte Digital, tells IT Pro. “There is, therefore, a clear link between growth and owning your own customer data."

Grobel continues: “Unsurprisingly, high growth organisations are also more creative in how they use first-party data. For example, when asking chief marketing officers (CMOs) what they are using first-party data for, most organisations claim to use it for optimising emails and personalisation. Meanwhile, high-growth organisations also use first-party data for more advanced activities such as dynamic creative optimisation.”

Preparing for a brave new cookie-free world

Since the advent of GDPR, which is designed to protect the privacy of individuals when they use digital services, the debate whether the giant data aggregators have become too powerful and how personal data is collected, stored, shared and used for not just marketing messages, but to profile the behaviour of every user has crescendoed.

Google’s approach is to remove the individuality of targeted ads with consumers being placed in larger cohort groups who've expressed similar interests and have similar digital footprints. Testing has been underway with Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in readiness for the official sunsetting of third-party cookies. This, however, has run into regulatory hurdles, with Google forced to compromise on its initial programme and replace it with a proposal called Topics.

A return to traditional mechanisms is also likely as brands collect their own data and use those insights to target their messaging. Expect to see more websites insist on account creation, so they can track interactions by compelling users to log on.

For consumers, this might deliver the control they want, as they'll need to consent to each cookie being installed on their devices. Brands, however, will be pushed to do better and show that the value exchange of data for goods or services is worth the cookie consent.

“It’s important to remember that the entire freemium economy is based on advertising,” Outbrain’s Lior Charka points out. “When users opt-out of sharing data, they receive less personalised advertising which in turn leads to lower CPMs and the need for more sites to switch to subscription models. So, there is a big trade-off when we incorporate more privacy laws. It’s one that consumers will need to consider down the road.”

Lastly, some form of digital fingerprinting could be adopted. Here, the browser, language and even keyboard layout can be identified. This digital profile of an individual can then be used to track them across the web, giving marketers all the information they need to target their ads.

Businesses can check their reliance on third-party cookies with the Cookieless Calculator developed by Gartner. “This identifies an organisation’s reliance on third-party cookies, assesses the potential impact and identifies mitigations and strategies to manage the transition," the company explains to IT Pro. "Across these assessments we found that an average of nearly 70% of website tags have a medium-to-high reliance on third-party cookies; 45% of digital media investments could be impacted and over half of all cookies used will be impacted – so there are some material consequences.”

Will the end of the third-party cookie push marketers into paying more attention to the security and privacy concerns of the people they target? That's undoubtedly the intention Google would like to communicate loudly. With the demise of third-party cookies fast approaching, what could replace them is, hopefully, a deeper understanding of customer needs and a fair exchange of personal data.

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The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) unveiled new mandatory data protection standards for the advertising technology (adtech) industry on Thursday.

New rules apply to companies designing new methods of online advertising and stipulate data protection laws must be followed and excessive data collection must cease, in line with the UK's Data Protection Act 2018.

The ICO published a Commissioner's Opinion which states data protection of users must be placed at the forefront of any advertising strategy designed by adtech firms.

“Ultimately, new online advertising proposals should improve trust and confidence in the digital economy, instead of weakening it,” the Opinion reads. “Solutions should be privacy-respectful while ensuring they give due consideration to other relevant laws.”

Users will have to be given clear opportunities to receive ads without tracking, profiling, or targeting based on excessive collection of personal data, the ICO said.

Accountability throughout the entire data collection and processing lifecycle is also now mandatory, with companies having to prove who is responsible for what task at each stage of the advertising strategy.

Each strategy must clearly identify the purposeful processing of personal data and consider ways to reduce harm and mitigate risks to individual users before any processing takes place.

Adtech companies must be fair and transparent about the benefits of data collection, articulating this to the users explicitly, and afford users ‘meaningful control’ over processing where possible.

The standard data collection and processing rules as set out by the Data Protection Act 2018 will also apply, such as the principle of data minimisation.

"What we found during our ongoing adtech work is that companies are collecting and sharing a person’s information with hundreds, if not thousands of companies, about what that person is doing and looking at online in order to show targeted ads or content," said Elizabeth Denham, information commissioner at the ICO. "Most of the time, individuals are not aware that this is happening or have not given their explicit consent. This must change.

"I am looking for solutions that eliminate intrusive online tracking and profiling practices, and give people meaningful choice over the use of their personal data," she added. "My office will not accept proposals based on underlying adtech concepts that replicate or seek to maintain the status quo."

It said Google's Privacy Sandbox is currently one of the leading proposals in the industry and that the ICO is currently working with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to review how the model can be applied in the UK.

Google's Privacy Sandbox aims to replace the use of third-party cookies with other technologies to enable digital advertising. The project is currently subject to antitrust allegations in the US and EU as it forces advertisers to work with Google on ads.

The ICO drew attention to failings in the adtech industry in 2019 saying it found massive illegality in the space with numerous violations of data protection laws, particularly with real-time bidding.

Despite this, the data regulator was threatened with legal action from the Open Rights Group alleging it had failed to enforce data laws against adtech firms falling foul to data laws.

The threat of legal proceedings prompted the ICO to restart its probe into the industry after it was initially paused, saying it didn’t want to put undue pressure on the industry as the COVID-19 pandemic started to take hold in the UK.

Twitter is selling its mobile advertising unit for $1.05 billion – three times the amount paid when it was acquired in 2013.

MoPub, which is currently used by 45,000 mobile apps for monetisation management, was bought by Twitter in 2013 for $350 million in stock. Eight years later, the monetisation solutions provider is being acquired once again, this time by AppLovin, following a unanimous approval by Twitter's board.

Founded in 2012, AppLovin is a mobile technology company which already owns mobile advertising, marketing, and analytics platforms MAX, AppDiscovery, and SparkLabs, as well as mobile games publishing and marketing business Lion Studios.

A pandemic success story, last year’s lockdown-induced video game boom saw AppLovin’s 2020 revenue skyrocket 46% to $1.45 billion. The company states that 49% of its revenue comes from businesses using its software and 51% from consumers making in-app purchases, according to CNBC.

MoPub will help AppLovin bolster its mobile advertising reach with an additional estimate of 1.5 billion addressable users worldwide. Its product features will be integrated into AppLovin’s own existing platform, according to the company.

The sale will also allow Twitter to invest in "the core products that position it for long-term growth," according to CEO Jack Dorsey, and build on existing plans of doubling its revenue in 2023 to $7.5 billion, which it announced earlier this year.

"The sale of MoPub positions us to concentrate more of our efforts on the massive potential for ads on our website and in our apps," added Twitter CFO Ned Segal.

The news comes six months after AppLovin became a public company, currently trading at $77 per share. Prior to that, the company acquired German app distribution and analytics company Adjust for $1 billion in cash and stock.

Twitter’s sale of MoPub is likely influenced by Apple’s decision to make it more difficult for digital advertisers to track users on iOS devices by allowing users to decide whether they consent to tracking. The move was heavily citicised by Facebook, which accused Apple of “trying to move the free internet into paid apps and services where they profit”.

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Today’s consumers want and expect personalised, relevant experiences more than ever, and for those brands that aren’t already delivering them, there’s a risk they could be left way behind the competition.

The importance of CX has changed how organisations market to their consumers and this has caused an eruption of channels and touchpoints that need to be managed, with continual, relevant, captivating content.

Discover the tools that today’s marketers need to optimise their CX delivery and thrive in the age of digital transformation in this informative guide.

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B2B buyer preference has shifted towards digital in recent years, and the restrictions necessitated by the pandemic have only pushed B2B e-commerce to a place it should have been much earlier.

While B2C processes have already largely gone digital as e-commerce has taken over, B2B has lagged behind. B2B processes, though involved in many of the behind-the-scenes processes of business-to-consumer online selling, have remained manual and inefficient.

B2B sites lack the same user-friendly interfaces as B2C sites; they don’t utilise review capabilities, discounts, or chatbots and other automation that would remove the need for calling customer service reps or flipping through catalogues.

Now that the pandemic has forced B2B sellers to quickly jump on the e-commerce bandwagon, we’re seeing the priorities of many companies shift to make digital selling more automated, improve customer relationships, and drive revenue overall.

One main way a majority of companies are pursuing this is by optimising their self-service tools.

How B2B sellers are meeting the rising demand for digital ordering

Even before the pandemic, B2B buyers were already trending towards buying more from websites than sales reps. Online purchasing is more convenient and gives the customer more control of the process. And with most everyone working from home the last year and a half, it’s been much easier not to have to get ahold of real people to complete a purchase.

Now sellers are implementing a variety of initiatives to meet these demands, with self-service tools being one of the top changes.

In a survey of C-level executives and heads of marketing and e-commerce from WBR Insights, 67% of responding companies said they planned to implement more self-service options for customers like self-service portals and customer-event-triggered marketing automation flows.

Other self-service events may include paying invoices online, checking order status or product availability, getting quotations and samples, and reordering.

Benefits of self-service tools for B2B e-commerce

Self-service tools are beneficial not only to shoppers but to merchants as well.

Brian Green, head of commercial sales and GTM in EMEA at Magento, says that “self-service capabilities are core to a good online customer experience” and allow “shoppers to get answers earlier in the sales funnel...without needing to interact with a sales representative.”

On one hand, chatbots make it so customers don’t have to call sales reps or wait hours or even days for an email back to answer basic questions.

On the other, the sales teams themselves are freed up to work on other higher-value services like cross-selling and up-selling and helping customers with more complex issues.

Self-service capabilities empower businesses to be more efficient in all aspects, from streamlining their procurement processes to making supply chains more resilient to disruptions like that of the pandemic. If physical interactions suddenly had to stop again, businesses with automated, online processes would be in a much better position than those with traditional, manual processes.

Some business leaders have qualms about the effect digitisation might have on client relationships if clients feel they can’t get ahold of a real person and feel like all communications are impersonal. However, you’re empowering the customer as well as your sales teams by giving them the tools to help themselves and being there in person why they really need you.

Digitisation also gives you more visibility into buying trends and customer behaviour so that you can adapt your marketing accordingly and deliver more personalised experiences.

Should I adopt self-service capabilities and other e-commerce tools?

If you’re still on the fence about the benefits of self-service, it’s worth asking yourself about the true value of self-service versus your current manual processes.

How much time do your customer service representatives spend on one single client, from the time they take a call, perform a service, and then follow up? What are you paying for this time, and could they be spending this time on more important activities?

Are there processes like recording sales and revenue or analysing data that could be automated for more efficiency? Again, what is the cost of the time it takes to do these activities manually?

Remember, digitisation will not take people out of the equation entirely, but is only meant to automate those processes that don’t need a human touch and make life easier for both buyers and sellers.

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• Projected growth of the market throughout 2021

Google is facing yet another antitrust investigation in Europe, with regulators launching a formal probe into the tech giant's lucrative digital advertising business.

The European Commission (EC) on Tuesday announced that it will investigate whether Google violated the bloc's competition rules by favouring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services.

In particular, the investigation will examine whether Google is restricting third parties from accessing user data for advertising purposes while using such data for its own service.

The EU watchdog plans to scrutinise the company's plans to stop making the advertising identifier available to third parties on Android and its controversial move to replace third-party cookies in Chrome. It will also investigate whether advertisers are unfairly forced into using Google's services such as AdX, an ads exchange platform that allows users to bid for online advertising space in real-time.

Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said: “Online advertising services are at the heart of how Google and publishers monetise their online services. Google collects data to be used for targeted advertising purposes, it sells advertising space and also acts as an online advertising intermediary. So Google is present at almost all levels of the supply chain for online display advertising.

'We are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack. A level playing field is of the essence for everyone in the supply chain. Fair competition is important - both for advertisers to reach consumers on publishers' sites and for publishers to sell their space to advertisers, to generate revenues and funding for content. We will also be looking at Google's policies on user tracking to make sure they are in line with fair competition.“

Google said in statement that it will “continue to engage constructively with the European Commission to answer their questions and demonstrate the benefits of our products to European businesses and consumers.”

“Thousands of European businesses use our advertising products to reach new customers and fund their websites every single day,” a spokesperson added. “They choose them because they’re competitive and effective.”

News of this latest investigation comes just weeks after the French competition authority fined Google €220 million for abusing its market power in the online ad industry. It also comes just days after UK officials announced they were investigating both Apple and Google over whether their combined dominance of the mobile ecosystem could be harming both users and businesses.

Humanising customer experience is critical for business success in today’s market, especially as brand trust is now more important in the decision-making process than ever before.

By relating to your customers on a personal level, your business can win your consumers’ trust and maintain it for the long term.

Leverage key insights from Customer Experience expert Clare Muscutt and Customer Success Director Charlotte Passemard, Global Programs Manager Matthew Meeks, and Head of Support Susana de Sousa today to build a human centric business for tomorrow.

Reaching the holy grail of a connected personalised experience requires organisations have a single, unified, and consistent view of the customer.

To do so, they must ensure that their MarTech stack is truly integrated, they are working in a flexible and responsive way to customer needs, and that they have access to all of the necessary data.

In this paper, you will learn:

• The key initiatives marketing and technology departments need to focus on to achieve true connectedness
• The specific areas where organisations are typically failing
• Tried and tested advice from technology and business transformation consultants who have delivered complex transformation programmes

Fill out the form below to access the free resource.

Salesforce has secured a high profile partnership with Disney Content Studios which will use the platform to support marketers and filmmakers for both streaming and theatrical content.

The cost of the deal has not been disclosed, or the length of the partnership, but Disney's StudioLAB will use technology from the Salesforce Customer 360 suite, which includes apps for marketing and commerce.

The deal will initially focus on streamlining production and marketing by developing digital workflows, performance analysis to inform 'executive decision-making', and the deployment of software that allows studio personnel to access workflows from any device.

Disney's StudioLAB is a unit dedicated to finding and deploying new technologies for storytelling. Its team is compromised of software engineers, film producers, theme park designers, and game developers, and its partners already include the likes of Microsoft, HPE and LG.

With Salesforce onboard, StudioLAB will also explore the use of technology to manage and accelerate content production with both companies collaborating on content from its initial conception all the way through to post-production, according to Disney.

"Salesforce's platform gives us the ability to accelerate and better coordinate the production process," said Jamie Voris, the chief technology officer for Disney Studios Content. "With Salesforce as our Innovation Partner, we can equip our marketers and storytellers with world-class technology to better deliver against the incredible slate of content we have planned for streaming and theatrical audiences."

Disney is set for a strong finish to the year with a host of films and shows set to be released in both cinemas and on its streaming platform Disney+. To manage this the company has secured partnerships with the world's largest cloud companies, including a deal with AWS to help push Disney+ into more regions across the globe.

IT is carrying the extra burden of supporting a remote workforce and the security implications that go along with it, while marketing is racing to serve the customer base and appeal to prospects across different touchpoints and devices. These teams have become the rebuilders as businesses strive to replicate their physical business with digital tools.

This means that collaboration between the two departments has become more important than ever – especially if you’re expecting to survive and thrive in the new business landscape. In our previous guide, we explored how Marketing and IT need to become the digital transformation dream team in your business. In this guide, we’ll explain how to help these departments meet their digital experience goals together during times of change.

As MSPs grow, achieving higher margins and maintaining recurring revenue becomes a challenge for them. This is mainly due to the poor knowledge MSPs have with regards to executing sales and marketing campaigns, especially when they are under constant pressure due to rapidly evolving customer requirements.

Most MSPs are run by technologists who essentially gravitate towards the features of the services and the technical capabilities they provide, but have limited experience with selling the value of the services. For MSPs to scale and stand their ground, they must create their own unique brand and value proposition and employ sales tactics that increase their opportunities. They have to learn how to identify their ideal customers, get the message across to them and retain them for longer durations.

Some MSPs struggle with sales and marketing processes due to budget constraints and the inability to hire people with the right skills. However, MSPs can maximize their marketing investments by implementing several cost-effective strategies to attract qualified leads. In this eBook, we’ll discuss three comprehensive marketing and sales strategies that can help MSPs strengthen their sales pipelines and win more customers, all without blowing out their budgets.

Did you know 65% of marketers have no official mobile strategy? Don’t let that be you. Punch above your weight with this guide featuring advice on SMS/push notifications, cross-channel integration, and performance testing.

Download our ignite guide to get up to speed and learn about the benefits of mobile marketing.

Proper data management is key to your marketing effectiveness—helping you create memorable customer experiences, strengthen audience targeting, and optimise everything you do over time.

This guide sets out a three-step plan for delivering successful marketing campaigns, based on effective data management.

As well as data audits, market segmentation, and running campaigns, it also explores the important role of reporting and accountability so you can constantly fine-tune your efforts. Finally, the guide sets out what you should be looking for in a robust and effective data management platform.

Learn how to create and improve your customer experiences over time in this whitepaper.

Adobe has announced its intent to acquire Workfront for $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) as it looks to add collaboration tools to its marketing business.

The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year, subject to regulatory approval, Adobe said.

Utah-based Workfront develops project management software for enterprise customers. It will add some 3,000 corporate customers and around one million users to Adobe, with Bloomberg suggesting the takeover could potentially be completed within a week.

Whenever the deal goes through, it will be the first major action by executive vice president Anil Chakravarthy, who joined Adobe in January.

“Adobe is the undisputed leader in content creation, management, delivery, and measurement and a trusted partner to digital leaders around the globe,” said Chakravarthy.

“The combination of Adobe and Workfront will further accelerate Adobe’s leadership in customer experience management, providing a pioneering solution that spans the entire lifecycle of digital experiences, from ideation to activation.”

The deal is seen as Adobe's biggest effort to boost its Experience Cloud division, which includes its marketing, advertising and analytics services. The idea is to make its creative and business applications more collaborative, enabling teams to work closer on projects as they continue to operate remotely.

Workfront has seen growing interest in its services during the pandemic as marketing firms have sought more insight into their operations. The company's CEO, Alex Shootman, called the Adobe takeover an "awesome outcome".

"When you have an opportunity to work with the company that CMOs rely on to run their business, which is Adobe, and you're a company like Workfront, that takes us forward years in terms of what we would have been able to accomplish on our own," he said.

High-quality, consistent customer experience is the cornerstone of business success in the 21st century. In order to reach customers through targeted marketing communications at every point of their journey and through every channel, data management tools have emerged as a crucial part of the marketer’s toolkit.

The data management platform (DMP) is a strategic technology best used for an organisation with heavy online advertising and no direct customer relationships, while a customer data platform (CDP) is best suited for organisations trying to nurture long-term, one-to-one customer relationships.

There are a number of other factors that decide the tools an organisation chooses. This whitepaper looks ahead to the adoption of overarching audience strategies and tools that can deliver the functionality of both a DMP and a CDP. Download it now for advice on choosing the right data management tool and integrating it into your business.

Salesforce has launched a new platform that combines its marketing, commerce and digital services into one single package.

Called Digital 360, the platform claims it will give businesses the ability to operate at peak levels every single day.

With the continuing impact of the coronavirus pandemic being felt around the world, Salesforce's Digital 360 platform aims to help make digital transformation faster and easier. It combines Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud with access to the firm's broad partner ecosystem.

There are also new products within Digital 360, such as a customer data platform called Customer 360 Audiences, a payment solution powered by Stripe called Commerce Cloud Payments, and Experience Cloud which enables fast CRM-powered digital experiences.

"Every company has gone digital overnight because of the pandemic," said Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM of Digital at Salesforce. "With Digital 360, we're delivering the full power of Salesforce tailored to digital leaders - our products, ecosystem, learning and expert services - enabling them to move with the speed, agility and scale they need to operate at Black Friday levels every single day."

Digital revenue in 2020 grew by 71% compared to the previous year, according to Salesforce's Q2 Shopping Index. As such, the cloud giant suggests that the key to success, in any industry, is scalable, data-driven solutions that personalise customer experiences, whether that be from marketing emails and timely advertising to online shopping and in store experiences.

The service has already seen success, with companies such as Sonos using it during the pandemic to sell directly to its partners.

"Our collaboration with Salesforce has supported Sonos' ability to scale and accommodate a massive influx in business to our e-commerce site as we focus on selling directly to our customers," said Lindsay Whitworth, director global direct-to-consumer at Sonos.

"As a result, we've been able to deliver relevant, personalised engagement at scale using campaigns and data-driven insights."

The drastic change in 2020 has surfaced uncertainties about the future of business. Leading and challenger brands are feeling the business pain of the global crisis. Never has it been more important to win business, through keeping and gaining customers.

This whitepaper identifies five key digital marketing strategies that can help you boost your customer experience (CX) to help your business successfully navigate through the current situation and get ready for the future.

Download it now to begin enabling your rapid response.

We live in a world filled with information on everyone and everything. Trying to make sense of all this data is a constant challenge for businesses. One way to do so is to conduct market research, which involves using tools and techniques to gather information and better understand a target market.

Market research enables marketing firms and researchers to collect key information on their audiences and market, develop better products and user experiences, and create more effective marketing messages.

While traditional market research tools are effective and have their place, a wide assortment of technology now exists to make market research quicker and more efficient. Understanding these methods and tools will allow you to make the most of market research.

Market research falls into two categories:

• Primary research involves conducting your own research to collect data. Examples include conducting focus groups and doing surveys.
• Secondary research involves analyzing the results of data collected by other people’s research. Examples include reviewing a company’s financial data and analyzing other researchers’ studies.

Surveys

Market research through surveys involves asking a series of questions and then collecting, organizing, and analyzing the responses.

To ensure you get high-quality responses that will actually help you, you must ask clear questions that align with the goal of the survey—are you trying to find out how your audience feels about your existing product, or do you want to find out if there’s a gap in the market you could fill? Your questions can be open-ended, yes-or-no, or a mix of both.

Survey responses provide a lot of data quickly, and if organised properly, they’ll deliver straightforward, actionable insights into the feelings and needs of your target audience.

Surveys can be conducted:

• In person (individually or in groups)
• Over the phone
• By mail
• Online

Focus groups

Focus groups allow you to speak more casually with consumers, with a moderator leading a recorded discussion of a group of around six to 12 people.

While focus groups are usually held for one to two hours in a room, often with a hidden observation area, it is possible to hold focus groups virtually during coronavirus. By reducing the session time and limiting the number of participants to about five to give everyone room to speak, you can still conduct insightful focus groups remotely. It may even allow you to sample from a more wide-spread group as location isn’t an issue.

In person or online, focus groups will still involve people interacting with each other, the occasional tangent, or one person dominating the conversation, so results can vary. To balance the results, conduct several focus groups on the same topic.

Interviews

To conduct an interview, an interviewer will ask the subject direct questions. Interviews are more personal than surveys, and are ideal for asking open-ended questions. They allow the interviewer to go into greater detail and conduct follow-up questions based on the subject’s responses.

Interviews can be time-consuming, and the quality of the responses will depend on the quality of the questions asked. Leading questions — questions that encourage the respondent to answer in a certain way — can also skew the results, so it’s important to word the questions in such a way as not to lead answers in one direction.

Experiments

Experiments involve testing theories in a participant’s environment using dependent and independent variables. The researcher uses the independent variable to see how it affects the dependent variable. For example, suppose a researcher is trying to find out how the amount of sleep a student gets affects his test scores. The independent variable would be the number of hours of sleep, and the dependent variable would be the test score.

The results of an experiment are most likely to reflect what happens in real life because of how the experiment is set up in the participant’s natural environment. However, outside variables beyond the researcher’s control can affect the results, and it can be difficult for other researchers to repeat the results.

In addition, doing experiments with people who are unaware of the circumstances can be fraught with ethical issues.

Observational market research

Researchers obtain information by observing people in either a natural or controlled setting. The subjects should not know they’re being observed so they behave naturally and show their true feelings and actions. It’s important not to pressure subjects or make them aware of being observed, as they might act differently then.

This type of market research works best in retail settings and can provide data on shoppers’ habits based on sales, dates and times of the year, and other factors. However, researchers have little control over most aspects of the environment, which can affect the results.

Competitive analysis

A competitive analysis involves categorizing and evaluating competitors for the purpose of understanding and comparing their strengths and weaknesses. The process typically begins with defining your product, service, brand and market. It then involves using specific metrics to compare your company with your competitor.

Competitive analysis can include:

• Marketing factors (e.g., public relations coverage, SEO structure, social media engagement)
• Product offerings (e.g., types of products, pricing)

A SWOT analysis is one common form of competitive analysis. It involves evaluating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Public domain data

Researchers can access openly available public domain data to support their research. This data is free to use, reuse and redistribute, although the data should be attributed to its source and shared with others to use.

Common sources of public domain data include government databases, polling statistics and think tanks. Another source is APIs, which provide developers with programmatic access to applications.

Analyzing sales data

Sales data usually combines with market research data to complete a picture of market research insights. It demonstrates the effects that follow marketing efforts. Sales data provides more comprehensive understanding of customers and their purchasing habits, and how those habits change according to time and circumstances.

While the data is limited to understanding customers, rather than their environment, this information can provide a more complete picture when combined with other market research.

Purchasing research

When researchers cannot find the appropriate public domain data for free, they can purchase research results. They can subscribe to industry and research reports, such as BCC Research, Euromonitor, Mintel and other sites to collect the data they need to do market research.

This type of information is typically categorized and organized in an easy-to-use format, which makes it more efficient to use and analyze.

Social media listening

People freely share their thoughts, opinions and other content on social media on a wide range of topics. This makes social media a great source of data for researchers.

Researchers can use social media listening tools to analyze relevant posts when researching specific topics. One example includes tracking what consumers say about a brand and its products.

Since most social media comments are unprompted and unfiltered, posts are typically accurate representations of each person’s thoughts and feelings about that topic.

Widewail has teamed up with Lexus to ensure the luxury automaker’s customers enjoy engaging online experiences.

Widewail's Engage solution, which provides online customer review monitoring and response management for businesses, will launch on August 1. Lexus is expected to cover the monthly subscription fee for participating dealers for one year.

As automakers and car dealerships face the impact of the coronavirus, Lexus is gearing up to improve its dealerships’ online operations across the US. For dealers using Widewail's Engage solution, that means effortless reputation monitoring and real-time responses to customer reviews.

Widewail’s Engage solution also aims to optimize positive reviews for search, recognizing that 57% of consumers will only consider businesses with 4-star or higher ratings.

"Online customer engagement through reviews and social media has a large impact on search rankings today and can easily – and immediately – influence a customer's decision to buy, recommend, or make contact with that business," said Matt Murray, founder and CEO of Widewail.

"All too often, a business suffers at the hands of a negative, unanswered review or social comment, a positive review that goes unappreciated, or worse, individuals who don't represent the company injecting their opinion. We are proud to introduce our solution to Lexus dealers and ensure they never miss an opportunity to deliver a positive customer experience."

David Telfer, national manager of digital marketing at Lexus, added: "At Lexus we have always held guest experience as our top priority. Now, more than ever, our customers are interacting with our dealerships online. With thousands of customer interactions happening each day, we need a solution for our dealerships that is of the highest quality, personal, and cost-effective.”

Telfer continued, citing Widewail’s “thoughtful approach to engagement management and unique focus on conversational SEO” as the reason why the automaker tasked the Burlington, Vermont-based company with improving its customers’ online experiences.

For Amy Nail, marketing director at Jim Koons Automotive Companies, Widewail’s products have already provided the Jim Koons family of dealerships with true peace of mind as it relates to both their customers and their overall reputation.

"When customer issues do arise, the Widewail process is quick and seamless, and we immediately put the customer at ease and take any issues offline. Having the expertise of the Widewail team in our corner has allowed us to focus on other aspects of our digital strategies with the peace of mind that our online reputation is being guarded," Nai said of Widewail’s services.

Lexus isn’t the first automaker to use Widewail’s Engage solution, as the company already works with Subaru, BMW and MINI.

Today, Equifax announced its new Response DIGITAL solution suite, which will help businesses create and maintain effective customer relationships in a socially distanced society. Built with the understanding that the coronavirus will have a long-lasting impact on customer experiences, the Response DIGITAL suite provides business with a slew of digital marketing, identity trust and fraud prevention solutions required for e-commerce.

By using the Response DIGITAL solution, businesses will be able to facilitate online payments, whether they are related to new purchases or prepayments. The suite will also enable businesses to verify a customer’s identity, ensuring a customer’s information can be accurately collected online when opening a new account, applying for a credit card or loan, or filing an insurance claim.

"Improving online business presence has become a requirement of the social-distancing economy," said Sid Singh, president of United States Information Solutions at Equifax. "Bank branch offices, car dealerships and brick and mortar businesses of many types may take time to reopen as the COVID-19 situation continues to unfold. At the same time, consumers and small businesses are online and looking for the same type of service and support that they received in face-to-face interactions. With Response DIGITAL, we are helping businesses of all sizes prepare to both maintain and grow customer relationships in a digital environment while helping them to fight online fraud."

At a time when many organizations face reduced marketing budgets, Equifax has also teamed up with The Kessler Group to help companies get a jumpstart on acquiring new accounts. By including a selection of customizable marketing and funding solutions within the suite, Response DIGITAL can help companies revitalize marketing efforts and accelerate growth.

The Response DIGITAL solution suite is available now.

Tools for marketing and creative processes often don’t function the way they should. This might be because they’re numerous and disconnected, used across teams in incoherent ways, or siloed with limited use. This makes quality and consistency difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to maintain.

This whitepaper explores the possibilities and methods for achieving better creative and marketing consistency by employing solid governance policies, master data practices, and a content hub.

Download it now to discover how to create centralised workspaces that bring together creative assets, product data, analytics, and workflows.

Your customers expect memorable moments at every brand touchpoint. And when you have websites, social pages, blogs, and mobile content to consider, it can feel impossible to deliver everything with quality and speed.

Stitching together the systems, data and processes needed to manage content creation and delivery at scale across channels is a daunting task. And with today’s content personalisation mandate layered on top of this work-stream, the daunting task becomes a full-blown crisis.

This whitepaper explores how a content hub built on a new class of systems and processes is able to bring about a marketing transformation, helping to supercharge your marketing operations.

Modern customers crave memorable personalised experiences. That’s why 83% of the marketers we asked in our recent survey – carried out in association with the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) – have increased their personalisation budget in 2019, with 32% pointing to a “significant budget increase.”

Money helps – but it can’t slingshot you all the way to personalisation perfection. In the same survey, we also discovered a number of barriers to personalisation – many of which can only be resolved by adapting the culture of the organisation you work for step-by-step, day-by-day.

This whitepaper sets out the 5 main barriers modern marketers are facing, exploring the origin of each problem and how they can be overcome.

Design enables businesses to create quality customer experiences that build brand loyalty, yet hasn’t always been considered a business priority, with design leaders struggling to educate stakeholders of the business value. However, even with the increased prioritisation of design, teams are struggling to keep up, reporting a lack of talent and tools needed to compete.

This whitepaper presents findings of a maturity assessment survey of 385 design professionals in an effort to evaluate design systems - the principles, templates, components, processes, tools, and people that guide an organisation's design efforts.

Download it now to discover how and why taking the risk on design-investment creates business benefits for your organisation.

Having an effective personalised data model is an essential part of modern retail. Highly tailored, unique customer experiences help businesses to get ahead of the competition, and they've also become something that customers have grown to expect. However, there's a definite compromise between offering better personalisation and breaching consumer privacy.

Thanks to online market leaders like Amazon, customers have grown accustomed to personalisation in their online shopping experience. The product recommendations consumers see are no longer suggested because of customers like them; they're tailored because of the information and data on that individual shopper. But delivering this personalisation is becoming harder to achieve

Accessing the right data to deliver these experiences is key. Brands don't want to suffer from delivering out of date or irrelevant personalisation that then negatively affects the customer's opinion of the brand - the complete opposite of what they're trying to achieve.

Similarly, with the pressure from consumers to be data-driven, too much focus is spent on collating new customer data when the focus should also include ensuring existing data is up to date. Marketers then also need to consider how they store this information and make sure they have the right tools to turn the raw data into meaningful insights.

The introduction of GDPR meant a huge change in how businesses were able to collect and use personal data. Marketers understood the importance of data-driven marketing and personalised experiences, but these new regulations meant that any data used incorrectly, or without consent, could result in heavy fines.

Marketing departments must bear privacy in mind at every step while they process the data and use it to deliver a personalised experience to their customers. It's a delicate balancing act.

The Data Protection Problem

Data protection regulations are forcing more stringent controls which essentially safeguard how data is collected and used. We've all heard of GDPR, but this regulation isn't alone in fortifying consumer data. Across the pond, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) sets a marker as to the extent the world's leading capitalist economy is reining in the wild data-methods used by firms to enhance the customer experience.

It's fair to say that across the entire globe there's a real increase in the awareness of data privacy, handing control back to the buyers. But if this comes at a personalisation-cost, negatively impacting the customer experience, why are regulations in place?

Well, because they provide a set of rules that must be followed, guiding both professionals in how they use personal data and telling consumers of their rights. GDPR and other notable regulations don't have to be restrictive, they instead should be viewed as a structure within which to build a personalisation strategy. Data protection's sole aim isn't to make the marketer's job more difficult. Viewed from a certain angle they can even be said to support marketers in their exploits. It's all a matter of perspective.

Making data-protection work for you

The question we have to address is whether personalisation and data privacy can co-exist.

Data is principally collected in three ways:

• Customers can be directly asked whether they consent to their data being collected and utilised.
• Customers can be tracked indirectly.
• Third-party data can be purchased from external sources.

Third-party data is typically the kind most liable to fines, meaning that to avoid the pitfalls of GDPR, organisations may have to lean more heavily towards collecting data directly.

The secret to tip-toeing the data-protection minefield is transparency at every stage of the personalisation journey. Both providers and platforms have to notify users at every turn, which may lead to negative results in the short term at least through a loss of insight from third-party cookies and tracking. In the long term, however, internal data will be strengthened making for a more sustainable practice.

Otherwise, make regulations work for you by using them as an advertising tool. By going above and beyond to demonstrate that you are not only complying with data-protection regulations but putting customers first by introducing policies that further bolster the control they hold over their data, they, in turn, may look more favourably upon you.

But what does this mean for personalisation? Enhancing privacy restrictions by removing cookies, for example, will make it more difficult to optimise spend and deliver targeted messages. Suddenly we degenerate to the 'casting a wide net approach', one that opposes the very principles of personalisation.

Hyper-personalisation

The most important thing to do is to not give up. These are turbulent times for data privacy, but fundamentally customers have become accustomed to familiarity when navigating websites. Foregoing a personalisation strategy will see you slipping behind competitors.

Plotting the route to hyper-personalisation involves working smart with data by being certain of transparency, that customers will not complain about how their data is used, and by extracting maximum insight from lesser volumes.

Hyper-personalisation is consistently conveying the right message without breaking privacy rules. Data should be gleaned from multiple touchpoints and interpreted as part of a sophisticated data-driven marketing strategy to ensure consumers are targeted with only relevant messages likely to encourage interaction. With device-culture, customers may use a laptop, their iPhone, not to mention watches, tablets and desktops. Hyper-personalisation eases communication across each endpoint, ensuring they work together to gather information and provide a complete snapshot of the customer, taking into account lifestyle and online behaviour.

Every customer has specific needs and expectations that they demand are met. Hyper-personalisation is essential to drive more meaningful interactions, upping loyalty and aiding the buyer's journey.

The French competition authority has imposed a €150 million (£123m) fine on Google for anti-competitive behaviour and having unclear advertising.

The tech giant was accused of mistreating advertisers who bought its keyword ads, tactics that have been labelled "brutal and unjustified" by the French regulator.

The decision published today concludes a lengthy investigation into the company that found a policy of using "opaque and difficult to understand" rules on its Google Ads platform, and that these were then enforced in an "unfair and random manner".

The platform is used to display adverts to users as they browse Google's search engine, which appear as organic results. However, the investigation found that rules governing how these ads can be surfaced were unfair and inconsistent.

Google has said it will appeal the fine, however, it signals yet further scrutiny of how the company promotes content via search and advertising.

More specifically it relates to the rules Google applies to its Ads platform which set conditions under which advertisers can broadcast ads — rules the watchdog found to be confusing and inconsistently applied.

It also found Google had changed its position on the interpretation of the rules over time, which it said generated instability for some advertisers who were kept in a situation of legal and economic insecurity.

A lot of that pressure has come from France. In September, Google agreed to pay French authorities almost €1bn to settle a four-year fiscal fraud investigation.

For this latest fine, the chairman of France's competition authority, Isabelle de Silva, said Google had "the power of life or death for certain companies that live by these advertisements".

"We don't contest Google's right to impose rules," she said according to Reuters. "But the rules must be clear and imposed equally to all advertisers."

Last year Google accounted for more than 90% of all revenues earned from search advertising, according to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which also recently expressed concerns about companies like Google that had become "entrenched with negative consequences" for those that use it.

Google has said it will appeal the fine, but also confirmed it had suspended an advertiser that was "running ads for websites that deceived people into paying for services on unclear billing terms".

"People expect to be protected from exploitative and abusive ads and this is what our advertising policies are form," a Google spokesperson said. "We do not want these kinds of ads on our systems, so we suspended [the company] and gave up advertising revenue to protect consumers from harm."

The UK should consider tougher rules for online giants like Google and Facebook as their dominance in digital advertising could be harming competition.

So claims the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which has released an interim report looking at how companies operate.

The CMA set out an investigation into major online platforms in July this year. It found that last year Google accounted for more than 90% of all revenues earned from search advertising in the UK and that Facebook accounted for almost half of all display advertising revenue.

While it stressed that "big is not necessarily bad" the CMA said it was concerned that these companies had become "entrenched with negative consequences" for those that use and depend on these services.

"Most of us visit social media sites and search on the internet every day, but how these firms work can be a mystery," said CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli. "Digital advertising fuels big businesses like Google and Facebook and we have been building a picture of how this complex new market works.

"We've looked especially at how these firms collect and use people's data, how they monetise it and what this means for rival companies who want to compete, as well as the people and businesses using these services every day."

Coscelli added that the CMA will present its findings to Boris Johnson's newly elected government as well as seeking comment on them.

Part of the issue for the CMA is that both Google and Facebook appear to offer free services, but consumers pay for them indirectly by providing their attention and personal data, which platforms use to sell digital advertising.

People in the UK spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes online each day, according to the CMA, and more than a third of that time is spent on sites owned by either Google or Facebook. It was also revealed recently that the four most used apps in the world all belong to Facebook: Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook itself. As a result, the digital advertising sector is now worth around £13 billion - much larger than any other form of advertising, the CMA said.

If you’ve ever wondered if your data could be converted into cash, then we have the answer. In fact, we have two. The first is a simple “yes”; in fact, it’s happening right now. The more accurate, and more nuanced, answer? Yes, but not in the way that you’re probably thinking.

Who owns our data?

The first challenge is that data isn’t something that can be legally owned. “You can have a bundle of intellectual property rights surrounding data,” said Olivia Whitcroft, a solicitor who specialises in data protection and intellectual property, speaking at this year’s Group M Huddle.

“So [we have] database rights, copyright rights around data,” explained Whitcroft. “The data protection laws say how you can use data and give individual rights to the data, but you can't actually own data. Yet there is a value placed on it - it’s unusual!”

Applied futurist Tom Cheesewright, speaking at the same event, pointed out that the market value is still surprisingly low. “If you go on to the dark web and you want to buy credit card CVVs so you can actually go and use it, it’s about £5. A full identity with someone’s social security and everything else is only about £30. So you can go and do full identity theft for £30.”

Chloe Grutchfield, co-founder of adtech specialist RedBud Partners, saw things through a more practical prism. “Let’s imagine that the average CPM [cost per mille, so 1,000 ads] is £5. It’s probably a lot lower than that. And then I will be exposed to 1,000 ads per day.”

Sadly, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get £5: once various companies have taken their cut, the direct “value” to the advertiser will be closer to £1. This then needs to go through the rewarding systems so that Chloe can reap her rewards. “I would get maximum - maximum - per day, 50p. So, not bad per year, but I’m going to have to sign up to several reward systems to even get that.”

Context equals cash

As Cheesewright was quick to point out, it’s all about the context. “In advertising terms, your data is worth very little. Against a purchase, it’s worth a relatively large amount.” As an active example, he pointed to Quidco. “The average reward for a Quidco user is about £280 a year.”

While it’s morally straightforward - and well-established - to claim the equivalent of cashback on products, things become more murky when the sale is more personal. “I remember one agency wanted to target people who had arthritis using location-based data,” said Grutchfield, “and from an ethical perspective I said no.”

The subject of ethics is a key one for Whitcroft. “Data protection derives from privacy and human rights laws, and that’s why we have it in place: to protect people’s fundamental rights,” she explained.

“When we start selling data, are we starting to infringe on those fundamental human rights? More vulnerable people, poorer people will perhaps be affected more because they're forced to sell their data because it’s a way to earn cash.

“Similarly, the big tech giants will be able to afford to pay people for their data, may use it for good purposes or may use it for their own business purposes, and then there may be smaller health companies who could really benefit from knowing people’s data to improve public health and they won’t be able to afford it.”

What happens next?

So what does our future look like? Who better to ask than a futurist? “Most businesses that have built a model of monetising a central store of data die. That includes social networks for me.”

If you own Facebook stocks, look away now: “All social networks fundamentally do the same thing,” explained Cheesewright. “They do one-on-one communication, they do one-to-many communication, the sharing of rich media. Do we need Facebook to own the infrastructure to do that or could we all have a standards-based client that could interact and share on a use-case basis?”

Cheesewright sees a future where that makes it easier to apply value to data without having to worry about the thorny issue of property rights, but admits that this is likely to take more than five years to evolve.

One thing is clear. We’re at the start of the journey here, and new services like Brave - a browser that currently blocks ads and website trackers, but last week announced an opt-in service where viewers would be paid in “tokens” for viewing ads from their own ad network - are interesting experiments rather being necessarily the future.

And we have still barely scraped the surface of where human rights sit in this data-driven world. “There are a lot of ethical issues to work out if selling data becomes a bigger thing,” said Whitcroft.

Google is the latest major tech company to impose restrictions on political messaging to boost confidence among voters in digital political advertising and in electoral processes across the world.

From next week, Google will restrict the targeting of political adverts to users by just age, gender and location at a post-code level. It's unclear how many categories that Google allows advertisers to target users with right now, but the firm insists it's never allowed granular micro-targeting.

The company's ads policy will also be clarified to explicitly ban new phenomenon like 'deep fakes'; doctored and manipulated media with high sophistication. Misleading claims about the voting process, or ads that make demonstrably false claims, will also be addressed.

"Given recent concerns and debates about political advertising, and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters' confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms," said Scott Spencer, vice president for product management at Google Ads.

"So we're making a few changes to how we handle political ads on our platforms globally. Regardless of the cost or impact to spending on our platforms, we believe these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide."

The changes are being rolled out in the UK first to coincide with the 12 December general election before the policy is rolled out to the wider EU by the end of the year, and in the rest of the world by 6 January 2020.

Google has previously offered targeted capabilities to verified advertisers based on public voting records, and general political affiliation. The firm insists its services, which manifest as search ads, YouTube ads and display ads, haven't granularly targeted users, although feels it can do more to raise the transparency of election ads.

Political advertisers can continue to contextually target users, for example, by serving ads to people reading or watching a story about the economy. Google suggests this is aligned to long-established practices in advertising through other media, such as TV, print or radio.

"Of course, we recognize that robust political dialogue is an important part of democracy, and no one can sensibly adjudicate every political claim, counterclaim, and insinuation," Spencer continued.

"So we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be very limited - but we will continue to do so for clear violations."

Google's policy revision comes after both Snapchat and Twitter announced that restrictions would be imposed on political ads.

Snapchat has claimed that all advertising will be subject to review, while Twitter took a more heavy-handed approach in deciding to block all political advertising.

Google is the latest of a string of companies to have clarified or revised their position on political adverts since Facebook insisted several weeks ago that it would not vet or fact-check political ads hosted on its platform.

Multimedia messaging app Snapchat now subjects "all advertising to review, including political advertising", the company's CEO, Evan Spiegel, told CNBC.

The announcement comes in the wake of Facebook's controversial political ad policy, which doesn't allow for any fact-checking, and Twitter's decision to block all political ads, which it defines as "content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome".

Snapchat has situated itself as a happy medium between Facebook and Twitter's two extremes by allowing political adverts on its platform, but only after they've been properly vetted.

"And I think what we try to do is create a place for political ads on our platform, especially because we reach so many young people and first-time voters we want them to be able to engage with the political conversation," Spiegel said, "but we don't allow things like misinformation to appear in that advertising."

Every ad on the platform is reviewed by a team of humans, rather than AI software, to make sure it adheres to Snapchat's guidelines, according to a spokesperson for the company. A few ads have been banned through this process in the past, the spokesperson noted.

Though debates over how to regulate and fact-check political advertisements has heated for social media platforms, Google, owner of YouTube, has remained relatively quiet on the matter. According to market research firm eMarketer: "YouTube overall represents a steady 11% of Google's net US ad revenues." That accounts for roughly $3.4 billion of revenue for the tech company.

Notably, Facebook grossed approximately $6.8 billion in video ad revenue for 2018, Twitter brought in $633 million, and Snapchat roughly $397 million, according to eMarketer. Although Snapchat's digital advertising business is significantly smaller than Facebook's, the company experienced a 50% growth in third-quarter advertising for 2019. Establishing advertising standards while that facet of its business is still growing could set a precedent for advert regulation on the platform far into the future.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said that all political advertising will be banned on the platform in what appears to be a snub at rival social media companies.

The announcement comes in the midst of intense public scrutiny of Facebook's policy to not fact check political ads posted on their site, with many commentators commending the decision.

Twitter has plenty of compelling reasons to block political advertisements from their site altogether. In his series of posts, Dorsey cited machine learning-based micro-targeting, misleading information, and deepfakes as new tech threats to civic discourse, "all at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale."

However, Facebook immediately shot back to defend itself against the suggestion that the company wasn't doing enough to police political messaging on its own platform.

"This is complex stuff. Anyone who says the answer is simple hasn't thought about the nuances and downstream challenges," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "I don't think anyone can say that we are not doing what we believe or we haven't thought hard about these issues."

Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, for which they've just paid out 500,000 in fines but rejected any of the liability, is a glaring example of just how powerful political ads can be, and just how dangerous they can become when riddled with false information.

Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal, commended Twitter's move to block political ads from their site, adding "over to you Facebook".

However, others are wary of the ramifications of Twitter's drastic action, and wonder how Twitter will distinguish an advertisement as "political" or not. "It's hard to define where to draw the line," said Zuckerberg. "Would we really block ads for important political issues like climate change or women's empowerment?"

Twitter will define exactly what constitutes a political ad when their new policy is announced on 15 November. The policy will go into effect on 22 November.

Twitter's move to completely eliminate political ads globally, and Facebook's reluctance to do the same, might make a bit more sense when considering the amount of revenue political advertising brings in compared to Twitter's overall income.

The company does not release specific figures each quarter, but reported that political ad spending for the 2018 midterm election culminated in less than $3 million. The total third-quarter revenue was about $824 million.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook's revenue from political ads is likely to be between $330 to $400 million next year.

Still, Twitter's has been the strongest action to date by any social media platform on the topic of political ads. Although disagreements may persist about the implications of the new policy, it's seen as the first major step towards regulating false information, microtargeting, and other harmful tech in political advertising.

Although GDPR’s second birthday is rapidly approaching, the dust is yet to firmly settle around its implementation. Many questions and concerns remain unanswered, destabilising a data landscape that modern industries must navigate with caution.

This rings true with few professions greater than email marketers, with the email marketing campaigns they conduct experiencing the largest cause of complaints to data protection authorities across Europe since GDPR’s introduction in May 2018, alongside telemarketing and the use of video surveillance.

That’s because GDPR alters how organisations are able to use data, particularly the third-party data email marketers use to target existing and potential customers. For whichever reason – be it misunderstanding the legislation, or being unable to deliver personalised experiences whilst complying – over 100 GDPR-related fines have been distributed, stemming from around 60,000 complaints received by the European Commission. And perhaps nothing highlights how large a hurdle GDPR can be than the ICO’s decision to relax GDPR enforcement during the coronavirus economic downturn.

To avoid debilitating fines, it’s vital for businesses to follow established best-practices principles concerning the use of marketing and data. However, that's easier said than done.

The main point of concern is customer consent. GDPR holds organisations accountable for the data they hold and use, requiring them to have a strong reason for touching data, referred to as ‘legitimate interest’ – such as fraud prevention or the fulfillment of a legal contract. Such data processing has to be necessary to the act of achieving this purpose, provided that the rights of the individual whose data is being processed aren't infringed upon.

There are a number of ways to meet the legitimate interest clause, though its often the case that marketers rely on an individual giving their explicit and informed consent. Previously, many companies relied on tiny and obscure check-boxes that are ticked by default in order to obtain 'consent' from customers but, under GDPR, companies must explain in clear, concise wording exactly why customers' data is being gathered and how it will be used.

Many marketing departments are concerned that, if customers are given the choice about whether or not they want to be sent newsletters and other forms of marketing materials, they will refuse it. However, Skip Fidura, Chair of the Responsible Marketing Committee at the Digital Marketing Association, believes that GDPR actually offers an opportunity for marketers to use GDPR to their advantage.

We spoke to him to find out some of his top tips for email marketers who want to survive GDPR.

1) Don't panic!

The biggest thing that digital marketers need to remember, Fidura says, is that GDPR is not the apocalyptic cataclysm that many are making it out to be. If marketers have been doing their jobs properly, he argues, the laws should have a minimal impact on how marketers do business.

"There's really nothing in the GDPR that email marketers haven't been talking about and doing as best practice for years. Being open, honest and transparent when it comes to getting consent - you can use the GDPR language, but it all boils down to being open, honest and transparent," Fidura explains.

2) Don't re-permission your lists, refine them

A common response to GDPR from many marketing departments has been to try and re-obtain consent from their entire marketing list for life-long messaging, but according to Fidura, this is an unnecessary effort. "The myth when GDPR first came out," he notes, "was that consent is the only way we can market and therefore, because I don't have GDPR-level consent, I have to go get GDPR-level consent."

In reality, he continues, what brands have done is to take a step back and examine their data, working out how much of their lists they can continue to market to under GDPR's 'legitimate interests' provisos, which customers they need to approach to ask for new permissions, and which customers should be culled from their lists entirely.

3) Follow best practice

This dovetails neatly with another of Fidura's top tips, which is to make a point of following best practice - i.e. reducing email lists when some recipients haven't engaged for a defined period of time - no matter how unpalatable it may seem.

"[Marketers] know they should be culling people off lists, but when you go to the finance people and say 'I've just cut 25% off our email list', the finance people go 'what are you, crazy?'," he says. "So actually, I think in some cases, marketers have been able to use GDPR to do what they know they should have been doing all along."

4) Audit your data regularly

Of course, you can't cut dead weight from your email lists if you don't know that it's there. Fidura advises that companies conduct regular audits of their data stores to ensure that they know exactly what state their lists are in.

"The problem with data is data has a shelf-life, and just like a piece of fish that's gone off, if you let it sit too long, it's gonna stink," he states. Companies need to be aware of how long data is going to be relevant for when they collect it, and should regularly audit it based on the inflow of data and how many people are accessing and modifying it.

5) Don't forget about ongoing compliance

Many organisations went into a mad scramble to get ready for GDPR last year, but that doesn't mean that the work to get compliant is done. As Fidura points out, GDPR is far from a one-time deal. While initially complying with the regulations is important, ensuring that you continue to uphold those standards is actually more critical in the long run. The further we get from May 2018, the more relaxed companies are going to get, and it won't be long before "they're going to buy some new system and forget that they've got to now plug that into their GDPR compliance".

"What they need to think about going forwards is, they need to remember the steps they went through to get to their GDPR compliance; the data audit that they did," Fidura says. "Every time they bring a new channel, tool or system online, they need to think about what the potential impact of that is to the consumer. If necessary, they need to do a privacy impact assessment and they need to document all that stuff, because [GDPR implementation] is not the end; it's the end of beginning. GDPR doesn't go away."

6) Build customer trust

GDPR might be scary for marketers, but in reality, it offers companies an opportunity to build a deeper, more trusting relationship with their customers. According to research by the Digital Marketing Association, 62% of consumers are more willing to share their data if they have GDPR explained to them, and more than 85% want greater control and transparency regarding how their data is used and collected.

"We know that consumers get to be more comfortable about giving up data when they know how the data's going to be used; that's just human nature," Fidura says. "I think the opportunity for all marketers is to start talking about GDPR, start telling people about what's in the GDPR, what their rights are, how the business is implementing that, so that they start to rebuild trust. And then, of course, they have to live up to that."

7) Be honest about what data you need

It's not just customers that marketers need to be honest with around GDPR; according to Fidura, they also have to be honest with themselves. As part of the data audits mentioned above, marketing professionals need to take a step back and examine what data they absolutely need to have, and what data they're gathering for the sake of it.

"The example I always use is this: we have DotMailer-branded socks. In theory, to know how many socks to buy, we should ask people their shoe size. As an email marketing company, do we really have a need for their shoe size?", Fidura notes. "No - because we're probably going to buy a bunch of large, a bunch of mediums and a bunch of smalls anyway."

8) Be accountable

One of the fundamental tenets of GDPR is making companies accountable to the people whose data they hold, but Fidura says that this is a standard which companies should be holding themselves to regardless, in the service of rebuilding customer trust.

"Whatever you do, if something goes wrong and you violate that trust, be accountable for it. Hold up your hand and say 'you know what, we screwed up'," he says. "Too often, corporations don't want to say anything until they know all the facts, but by then, they've lost the story."

9) Don't let lawyers write your privacy policies

For marketers, GDPR isn't simply about getting customers to check a box indicating that they're happy to receive your emails; one of the stipulations is that you must give them a specific set of details about how you're using that information. Similar to the oft-ignored terms and conditions agreements for software, this is often represented by a wall of dense legal text, but it doesn't have to be.

"Don't let your lawyer or compliance team write your privacy policy," advises DMA managing director Rachel Aldighieri. "Work with them and the creative teams and your communications teams to write that." She says that privacy policies can be engaging and attractive when done well, citing examples from EasyJet, the BBC and more.

This article was originally published in May 2018, and has since been updated to include additional figures.

Facebook has traditionally been an ideal platform to host a business page due to its strong advertising capabilities and large user base. However, it's not always the right fit for a particular brand, and so if you're considering moving to another platform you might be faced with the question of how to delete a Facebook business page.

With this in mind, it's important to understand how to delete a Facebook page and be fully aware of how this process works.

Why you may want to delete a Facebook business page

There are many reasons why any given business may choose to delete its official Facebook page. Ultimately, social media marketing can be hugely effective for some, but only when it’s done in a way that maximises its effectiveness - you can’t just have a presence and expect instant success.

Scrutinising the business’ target audience is crucial in determining whether it needs a Facebook presence. For example, it’s well known that Facebook is becoming less popular with younger generations which means brands looking to maintain and grow youthful audiences may find having to expend time and staff resources on running a Facebook page may not be economically optimal.

Facebook as a platform may not align with the business itself either. One of the main functions of Facebook is for family and friends to keep up with each other’s lives and as such, businesses in sectors that aren’t family-friendly, for example, may want to think twice about having a presence on the platform.

While you may be able to reach business decision-makers through Facebook, they probably won’t be using the platform in a business context - whereas, with LinkedIn and Twitter, there’s a much greater likelihood that they are.

You may also have to delete a Facebook page if you’re consolidating duplicate pages into one - such as replacing pages for regional branches with a single umbrella page, for example. Equally, a merger may result in the dissolution of a brand, requiring its Facebook page to be removed.

Whatever your reasoning, deleting a Facebook business page is a fairly quick and straightforward process, but you might want to consider merging pages - if there are multiple - before you completely delete it.

What's important to understand is that if you do decide to delete a Facebook page, you will lose all the content forever, as well as anyone's page likes, comments, and interactions. Only follow these steps if you're certain you no longer want the page to exist.

How to delete a Facebook business page on iOS or Android

From the Facebook app, head to your list of pages and select the one you wish to delete. Tap 'Edit page' for options and then select 'Settings'. Scroll down to find the 'Remove page' section and tap the option to permanently delete the page.

You'll see a warning, but click to continue if you're 100% sure you want to remove it and your page will be gone.

You do have 14 days to reverse the deletion, so if you change your mind, you can restore it.

How to delete a Facebook page from your browser

The process if you're using your browser to manage your Facebook page is equally as simple. Just head to the page you'd like to delete, head to the settings option under 'Edit page' and scroll to the bottom to 'Remove page'.

Hit delete and hey presto! Your page will be removed. As is the case on mobile, you can restore your page within 14 days of deleting it, but after that, it will be gone forever.

How to delete a Facebook page if you're not an admin

Obviously, both of the options above assume you're an administrator on the page, but what happens if you're not and it was set up by an ex-employee?

This is a little trickier and is a more involved process than simply deleting the page as an admin. First, you will have to report the page to Facebook for a breach of your intellectual property.

To do this, go to the page you want to delete, click the three dots below the page's cover photo and select 'Report page'. You can explain why you want the page to be removed and it will be up to Facebook whether it removes the page or not.

Not sure about deleting your page? You can always ‘unpublish’

While deleting your Facebook business page might be the right thing to do, you can always hold off on this process and still achieve a similar outcome by ‘unpublishing’ the page.

Unpublishing a page will remove it from public view while still keeping the page live behind-the-scenes. To do this, you’ll need to visit your Facebook’s page profile and visit the Settings & Privacy screen.

From here, you click the ‘View’ button located next to the Deactivation option. This will allow you to choose to deactivate the page after answering a few short questions about why you want to unpublish.

Similar to other executive-level manager positions within a company, a chief marketing officer’s (CMO) role is much more complex than the title suggests. You’ll find that modern CMO’s have a prominent role in ensuring that their company carries out digital transformation, although it’s fair to say that the role pivots around finding ways to market the organisation too.

It’s often becoming the norm for CMOs to be pragmatic and agile in the modern era’s rapidly changing technology landscape, and they need to have the skills to be able to discover emerging trends in customer behaviour in order to help the company. This has seen the role evolve away from its traditional responsibilities of simply understanding how to market their company to customers most effectively. Overall, you’ll want to ensure your customers are provided with the best possible experience and, as you might have guessed, that usually involves some form of technology.

It can sometimes be a challenging task to ensure your customer is at the centre of your organisation’s digital strategy, especially for companies that have traditionally isolated their IT departments. For CMOs who are looking to embrace technology, they’ll have to make sure that various stakeholders work together, from IT, marketing, and sales, to provide customers with the right services.

Similar to other high level executive roles like chief information officers, CMOs are usually only hired by big businesses who have the money to spend on a marketing strategist. When it comes to smaller companies, the position doesn’t usually only belong to one person - it’s normally split across a number of different department heads or amalgamated into other roles. Despite this, the main functions of a CMO are still performed, it’s just the role is shared between different people.

What does a CMO do?

A CMO is the person who manages the strategies for business transformation. They will work with others in the organisation to roll out these ideas and is primarily responsible for measuring how everyone - customers, partners, employees - perceive the company.

Their role covers marketing, PR and internal comms, executing customer experience campaigns to measure sentiment and then the strategies to change any negative attention.

The CMO will make sure the messaging is consistent across the entire organisation, so whether interacting with the brand online, in print or on broadcast media, the same messages are communicated.

Social media and digital media have changed marketing as a whole, meaning customers can easily provide feedback to businesses in real time, for all to see - most often in the form of complaints on Twitter. This makes any marketer or customer service personnel's role more challenging, and is one thing a CMO must carefully consider.

What is the difference between a CMO and CIO?

In addition to being responsible for all marketing efforts within an organisation, CMOs are now increasingly the ones driving a move to cloud computing internally.

Indeed, analyst firm Gartner has even found that CMOs have made the shift from digital-first to hybrid multichannel strategies. The firm asked CMOs to report the proportion of their 2022 budget allocated to online and offline channels, and found that online channels take the largest share at 56%. Offline channels, however, account for 44% of the total available budget, which Gartner called a more equitable split than in recent years.

Businesses live or die by their reputation and how they are perceived by consumers. As such, an organisation's success can be made or broken by the vision and actions - or lack thereof - of its CMO. Many businesses rely on a mixture of internal marketers and agencies, but the buck still stops with the CMO in signing off activity, so a lot of power and responsibility rests on their shoulders.

CMOs are also, indirectly, responsible for customer acquisition and retention. The right kind of marketing campaign can attract new customers to the business, but it's targeting and analytics of behaviour that will likely keep them loyal. As such, the CMO should work closely with the person in charge of the sales organisation to ensure marketing messages and the messages actually taken to market by personnel are in sync.

Furthermore, the CMO is expected to hold most of the power when it comes to implementing tools and processes that will drive real change in the business, such as a shift to digital or cloud computing.

So, it seems the CMO is someone other C-suite executives and line of business heads really want to get on side if they want to effect real change and digitally transform the way they work through technology.

What qualifications does a CMO need?

Most people working in marketing, particularly those in or heading to a marketing leadership role, have studied for professional qualifications to validate their real-world experience.

Accreditations from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) are probably the most widely recognised in the UK, but there are other qualifications that also demonstrate an individual's aptitude for the job.

How much does a CMO earn?

CMOs can expect to earn a more than decent salary, particularly if they pick a very specialised industry where marketing skills are even more in demand. The money on offer ranges from £54,000 to £152,000 with an average of £99,309, according to 2022 figures from Payscale.

Twitter is possibly one of the hardest social media nuts to crack. Although it promises a lot for business users, and specifically those that want to use its leadership and influence capabilities, it can be very time consuming to manage, with a focus on interaction and responding, rather than simply posting.

One of Twitter's differentiators compared to other social media tools is that it generates so much more conversation, with people posting quickly and often very direct replies.

Twitter is a great customer service platform, too. Because it's so open, it can expose a company's flaws and potentially damage reputations. That said, it's a great way to demonstrate crisis management, with informative and accurate replies crucial to winning back some of that positive energy.

It's also a good place to connect with influencers, find out about the latest leaks and news and converse with people in real time. Instagram and Facebook just aren't designed to be used in the same way.

Twitter is growing in importance for politicians too. Donald Trump, for example, has pushed the platform forward, using it as a platform to voice his opinions, connect with voters and vie for support.

Twitter is first and foremost a marketing tool and, as such, it should be analysed and activity scrutinised in exactly the same way as your website is to make sure you're making the most of it.

Twitter Analytics is an extremely handy tool to help you understand how your followers are engaging, helping you to decide which posts people want more of and which you should perhaps scrap. You'll be able to see which accounts following you are most active, which click through to view more on your website and, ultimately, who is most likely to convert to become a loyal customer.

Although there are lots of tools to decipher how people view your Twitter account, the in-built Twitter Analytics are the first place to check out, before you start investing in extras. Here's how to use them.

How to see how many people have viewed a tweet

Many Twitter users will be au fait with the service's basic analytics package. These are the reply, like and retweet buttons that sit underneath every tweet. These will give you a broad understanding of the people who have interested in a particular tweet. But to get under the skin of how others respond to your glowing tweets, you need to go deeper and use Twitter's full-on toolset of goodies.

To get more data on how well your tweet is doing, click on the bar graph icon beneath the tweet to see its activity. This works both on the mobile app and Twitter's desktop site. This displays the basic analytics data for that tweet, including the number of times people have seen it, how much they've interacted with it by liking, retweeting or replying to the tweet, and how many times they've clicked on an image or link within it.

If you need a little more in-depth data as well as wanting to track a tweet's activity across a greater time frame, you can use the analytics tools integrated into Twitter's desktop website. There are aimed mainly at organisations that want to use the service for adverts and campaigns, but these tools can also help in tracking how well non-promoted tweets are performing as well.

How to access Twitter analytics

To access Twitter analytics, go to analytics.twitter.com, or click your profile picture in the top-right corner of the Twitter website to bring up the menu and click on 'analytics'. The homepage of the Twitter analytics site will show you a breakdown of all the key data from your Twitter account, with performance metrics (including number of tweets, mentions, followers and profile visits) from the last 28 days. It also compares those metrics to the previous 28 days to give you a sense of how you're doing.

Scroll down, and you'll find a monthly summary, with the metrics from each calendar month in chronological order, along with a number of highlights such as top-performing tweets or notable new followers.

Navigate to the 'Tweets' tab, and you'll find more detailed information. Here, you can examine the analytics data for tweets published within a specific period, as well as sorting tweets based on their number of impressions and engagements. You can also sort them based on the engagement rate, which is the percentage of people who saw the tweet and then interacted with it in some way, such as retweeting it or clicking on a picture.

The 'Audiences' tab offers a wealth of interesting information about who it is who's actually seeing your tweets. This has an almost frightening level of data; it includes all the usual data you'd expect such as age, gender and location breakdowns, but it also tells you which topics your audience is interested in. You can even access data about how many of your followers are homeowners, their household income brackets and even their net worth! Bear in mind, however, that this data is obtained from Twitter's partners, and applies only to your US-based followers.

If you want to tie your tweeting into what's happening in the world, you can use the 'Events' page, which basically functions as an expanded version of Twitter's trending topics. It'll give you an overview of current and upcoming events - like trade shows or public holidays - telling you which kinds of people tweet about it the most. For example, the upcoming CES expo in Las Vegas is most often tweeted about by men aged 18 to 24 (surprise, surprise).

If you're aiming to create a sponsored promotional campaign, Twitter can facilitate that in various ways, such as offering conversion tracking which allows you to track visitors to your website on Twitter, in order to target them with more relevant ads.

There are various third-party tools which you can explore in order to expand your data-gathering and analysis efforts, but by mastering Twitter's built-in analytics tools, you'll be able to spruce up your social strategy until you're sharing like the pros.

Facebook is redesigning Pages for small businesses in an attempt to revitalise an aspect of its platform that has become strangled with oversaturation and algorithmic tweaks to the news feed.

Pages will increasingly serve as platforms for consumers to meaningfully interact with small businesses, by making reservations or booking appointments for example, against serving merely as marketing tools which organisations use to compete for news feed exposure.

As part of the wave of changes, user recommendations will be given more prominence, and ticketed events will allow organisers to sell tickets directly from Facebook Events. The tech giant's job application tool is also being expanded worldwide to help businesses more effectively advertise for employees.

"Local communities are built, grown and sustained by people," said Facebook's vice president of local Alex Himel. "People like your neighbors, your friends and your favorite local business owners. On Facebook, there are more than 80 million small businesses using our free business tools."

Facebook's recently-rolled out Stories feature, akin to that offered by Instagram, will be expanded to businesses so Page-owners can post their own Snapchat-like update for their users and engage with customers.

Also introduced as part of the revamp are a host of 'action buttons' that can allow Facebook users to perform actions beyond just sending a message - such as booking a service with the business.

"These improvements are a small part of our commitment to help businesses connect with customers," the company added on its Facebook Business site. "We'll continue to work on new ways to make these connections easier and more valuable to help all businesses grow."

Revitalising pages for small businesses is a much-needed endeavour given the combination of oversaturation, and changes to Facebook's news feed earlier this year that prioritised person-to-person interactions over person-to-brand interactions.

According to research by Social@Ogilvy, as reported in the Philadelphia Business Journal, organic post reach for pages with 500,000 or more followers may be as low as two percent - while it could be even lower for smaller pages.

Image: Shutterstock

New data protection rules will frustrate consumers who demand personalised experiences but are wary of handing over their data, but organisations who prove trustworthy stand to benefit, according to experts.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on 25 May and gives people more control over what personal data organisations can collect, allowing them to move it to other companies or demand organisations delete it altogether.

It also requires companies to be more transparent about how they use people's personal information and gets rid of passive opt-outs some organisations relied on to obtain customer consent: now people must actively agree to their data being collected and processed.

As a result of that, and with GDPR making people more aware of the value of their data, marketers' jobs are about to get harder, according to The Content Advisory's privacy lead, Tim Walters, speaking at Aprimo's recent Sync Europe conference.

"I am convinced that GDPR will rather significantly reduce the amount of first party and third-party data that marketing teams have access to," he said.

Walters said the data was the fuel for marketing efforts and pointed to a recent report by Accenture that identified a more systemic or structural problem that is choking off the supply of fuel for customer management.

But he pointed to a "vicious circle" being created by GDPR, where customers want "hyper-relevant" experiences when shopping online, but are very reluctant to hand over their personal data that would inform those relevant experiences.

"Consumers will punish brands that do not provide ... relevant experiences by abandoning them for other providers," he said. "Not because they necessarily know that another provider can provide that experience, but because [they] hope that they can."

However, on the other hand, GDPR and the high profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, where millions of Facebook users' profile data was harvested to allegedly influence US voters in the 2016 presidential election, has increased public awareness about the risks around sharing their data.

"The fact that they don't know what's going on with the data that they surrender ... means that they are reluctant to provide that personal data. which is precisely necessary to create the kinds of experiences that they demand," said Walters, adding: "That's the vicious circle."

But GDPR provides an opportunity for companies that recognise people are in control of their personal data - creating that trust breaks the vicious cycle.

"Every company in the world, whether they are subject to GDPR or not, should be looking for some kind of framework or template or guidebook to show them how to go about putting consumers in control of their data," Walters concluded.

"That is the only way to make progress. That guidebook or template is exactly what the GDPR is."

Edmund Breault, head of marketing at Aprimo, told IT Pro that GDPR is absolutely going to help marketing organisations by putting customers at the heart of their efforts.

"While the efforts in the short term on marketing organisations to become GDPR-compliant have added burden, GDPR fundamentally makes customer-centricity a "legal" requirement," he said.

"We are now in a trust economy and marketers need to provide capabilities to allow consumers to stay in control of their data."

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has arrived, full force (pretty much) and although the effect it'll have on the majority of businesses is yet to be realised, one of the major sectors it'll impact straight from the off is marketing.

The ICO is already pretty active in fining businesses that don't comply with the UK's existing Data Protection Act and there are numerous examples of this - including a penalty for a PPI firm that made 8.7 million unsolicited calls to those who were completely unaware of their services. That particular company was charged 300,000 for non-compliance.

But the GDPR will significantly increase the value of fines. In fact, businesses could be charged up to 20 million, or 4% of a company's global turnover (whichever is higher) if they fail to comply with the new regulations - a vast amount of money for any company, let alone a small business and certainly enough to put a company into administration.

Marketers are likely to be one group targeted harshly by the ICO and so it's vital anyone in marketing carefully considers what their duties are and how they can make sure they sit on the right side of the law when it comes to data privacy.

Obtaining consent

One of the most important points of GDPR is that data must only be collected for a specific purpose and that purpose must be made crystal clear to those you're collecting data from.

Although it makes the process of collecting data more difficult, it will ensure that the customer will only receive emails they have opted in for, that they are happy to receive. If you want to use the data for a purpose other than that specified, you will have to gain further consent.

Another factor is explicit and informed consent. EU residents must give this type of consent and thus rules out the use of pre-checked boxes or any attempt to get a form of implied consent.

Constant plays a big role in digital marketing. The data controller and processor has to adhere to a clear set of restrictions. The rules around consent is that it is "freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by which they, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signify agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her".

What is personal data?

What constitutes personal data is greatly expanded from previous definitions enforced by the UK. It now includes identifiers such as IP addresses, cookies, mobile IPs and even search engines searches. This will be an issue for marketer's digital efforts as cookie are not generally collected with a person's consent.

GDPR also applies to automated personal data and to manual filing systems where personal data are accessible according to specific criteria.

The EU: in or out?

It also won't matter that your business is outside the EU. If you have any personal data on EU residents, your organisation needs to comply with the rules. Personal data may only be transferred outside of the EU in compliance with the conditions for transfer set out in Chapter V of the GDPR.

Making sense of it all

With it makes sense for marketers to put compliance efforts front and centre of their efforts to protect and use customer data. It will likely present a temporary issue for marketers. This means a changed approach to database building, data management, and the collection of consumer data.

Instagram has quietly begun trialling a set of e-commerce features, allowing some users to pay for goods and services without leaving the app.

A sample of businesses in the UK and the US are now accepting in-app payments for services, such as booking restaurant tables or taking hair appointments, without needing users to leave the app.

The photo and video sharing platform, which in November celebrated reaching 25 million listed business profiles, outlined its plans to "continue evolving business profiles" in March 2017 by rolling out the ability for users to book a service directly from a business' profile.

Shoppers on Instagram are currently redirected off-app to a business' website to process any payments.

Although scheduled to be rolled out later in 2017, in-app purchases failed to materialise. But TechCrunch was tipped-off by one of its readers that users were able to register debit or credit card details to their profile, along with setting a security pin, with a view to begin purchasing goods and services from a sample of businesses.

IT Pro approached Instagram and parent company Facebook, for comment and clarification on the in-app payments but neither company responded at the time of writing.

"As 800 million use Instagram each month to discover and follow their passions, more and more people are using it to connect with businesses they love," Instagram said in a blog post celebrating reaching 25 million listed businesses last November.

"In fact, over 80% of accounts on Instagram follow a business, while 200 million Instagrammers actively visit the profile of a business every day. As a result, the Instagram community is helping spur small business growth in big ways."

Instagram previously trialled shoppable photo tags in 2016, allowing users to see which products were in a post, and allowing them to follow through to purchase it from the business' site.

Facebook, meanwhile, has been exploring e-commerce for years mainly via its Marketplace, also revamping its Messenger platform to make it a more effective bridge between businesses and users, alongside a raft of additional features announced at its F8 conference.

Instagram's expansion into e-commerce speaks to the wider monetisation of social media. While making it easier for businesses to operate by better-integrating them with such platforms, social media giants are increasingly commodifying what have traditionally been more personal spaces.

GDPR fines shouldn't be the biggest concern for marketers, according to marketing tech company Dotmailer - instead, they should be worried about the reputational damage that arises from not acting in customers' best interests.

GDPR comes into force in just over a month, and one of the biggest concerns for companies is the hefty potential fines for breaching the new regulation, with a maximum penalty of 20 million or 4% of the company's global annual turnover - whichever is higher.

However, while these figures are particularly alarming for many marketing departments (which by definition deal with vast amounts of personal data), Dotmailer's client service director and Digital Marketing Association non-executive director, Skip Fidura, said that the more pressing danger is not the response from regulatory bodies but from customers.

"Forget about the fines! That's the headline; that's what they want you to hear," he told attendees at Dotmailer's annual customer summit in London. "Think about the cost to your business if you lose your reputation by betraying that trust."

As GDPR has not yet come into effect, there are currently no examples of this effect, but to illustrate his point, Fidura cited the case of TalkTalk, which suffered a catastrophic data breach back in 2015. The company received a fine from the Information Commissioner's Office of 400,000 for its poor handling of the incident, but even though the corresponding penalty it could have incurred under GDPR would have totalled almost 60 million, Fidura argued that this still didn't compare to the company's loss of reputation.

"TalkTalk was fined 80% of the maximum possible fine at the time: 400,000. Peanuts for TalkTalk," he said. "But they lost 1 billion off their market capitalisation. Way more than any percentage of the maximum fine under GDPR they would have faced. The fine is just the headline - it's the loss of reputation that you've got to worry about."

However, he stressed that GDPR "does not fundamentally change what [marketers] are trying to accomplish, and that's to get the right message to the right person at the right time".

John Mitchison, director of compliance at the Digital Marketing Association, called the legislation an evolution of the UK's current law, the Data Protection Act 1998. "Many of the problems that people come to me with as director of compliance at the DMA... they explain the problem that they've got, and I realise that it's not a problem with GDPR, it's a problem with the [Data Protection Act]."

"They've been doing things wrong, or in contravention of the DPA, for many years, and only now starting to worry about rules. The stretch between the current Data Protection Act and GDPR is not a huge distance. If you're doing things under the current regulations compliantly, then coming up to the standard of GDPR shouldn't be that big a stretch."

As part of the summit, Dotmailer also announced a series of product updates to its email and marketing automation platform, including new data protection features to help companies work towards GDPR compliance. This includes a new tool called Consent Insight, designed to give marketing departments more information about their customers' consent in order to prove compliance to regulators, including the text of the consent agreement they signed as well as their location, IP address, browser and more.

A new tool has also been launched to allow quick and easy exporting of this data in order to comply with Subject Access Requests - another GDPR component that allows consumers to request a copy of any data held on them by a company. This is also combined with a new functionality for deleting all of a customer's data from Dotmailer's platform if required, which includes a recycle bin to protect against accidental deletion.

All of the new features will be available for free to all Dotmailer customers.