We’ve been working with the country’s leading GDPR specialists to establish GDPR friendly marketing tactics that won’t scare the willies out of your customers and prospects. Here’s where we are with that?
It seems pretty clear that many people in business (not just in marketing) have their head stuck in the sand when it comes to GDPR. We can understand why. For years now, slick talkers in B2B marketing have been getting away with murder. They dazzle clients with buzzwords like “relevance marketing” and claims that “Person to Person is the new B2B”, then, when the pressure’s on, they take a U turn.
In the real world, sticking to best principles can be difficult. Faced with short term impatience it’s easy to abandon the idea that the best leads are the ones carefully nurtured from the ground up.
When push comes to shove, many marketers under pressure end up doing all of the things they set out not to do. They do a deal with an established list vendor (asking as few questions as possible) then start harvesting these new “prospects” by the thousands using some kind of sophisticated marketing automation tool like Hubspot or Pardot. Did the thousands of new prospects on the list really opt-in? Well the respectable list vendor says they did so let’s not ask any more questions right? Anyway, even if they didn’t, the one click unsubscribe option at the bottom of every email any (reputable) marketing distribution system sends out is enough to comply with current data protection rules.
This isn’t good enough anymore, and that’s a good thing. It offers a chance to re-focus. It’s an opportunity to get back to the honest content marketing principles that got all of us interested in B2B marketing in the first place.
Over the the past year we’ve establish ourselves as the “go to” marketing business for B2B companies that think GDPR should be more about opportunity than compliance.
We’re award winning B2B marketers that love new challenges and know how to tell great stories, so creating new GDPR friendly marketing approaches has been pretty invigorating for us.
It’s not something we’ve managed to do on our own either. We’ve asked dozens of experts for advice over the past months too. That’s helped us build a solid understanding of the rules that come with GDPR, but it’s not really helped us with the strategic marketing piece. GDPR is very clear on what we can’t do: the hard bit is working out how to leverage the positives in GDPR to create really engaging experiences that people want to opt-in too.
For most marketers in B2B, theres a long way to go, but the road gets easier when you know you’re on the right route. We’ve set out the first three milestones towards effective marketing under GDPR in our new email help series. Just sign up using the ballon at the bottom of this page to get it.