3 Actionable Insights with… Dun & Bradstreet CMO Stacy Greiner
The Drum’s 3 Actionable Insights series asks industry leaders to give their thoughts on the actions our readers should take immediately.
Dun & Bradstreet CMO Stacy Greiner
With the sunset of the third-party cookie and the sunrise of stronger privacy regulation, this was supposed to be the year that data dominated marketers’ attention. Instead, in many cases, the radical changes to the data landscape have been slowed. That’s why this is precisely the moment for marketers to prepare for what’s next, according to Dun & Bradstreet’s CMO Stacy Greiner. Here are the top three actions she recommends:
1. Establish one source of truth ASAP.
“We were at a point where it looked there would be a whole world that’s under a GDPR kind of situation. You just don’t hear about it now, but it hasn’t gone away. It has just given us time, as marketers, to get ahead.
“It’s time to get back to the basics. You’ve got to have one place where you’re really managing your customers’ first-party data and your third-party data together so that you can then create segmentation models on the fly for the campaigns that you’re running. You need to have one source of truth – a true data set.”
2. Don’t cut content marketing – expand it to grow your first-party database.
“The best way to engage with people is to have them actually opted in. We’ve gotten a little bit of an extension within the marketing world to have the time to really go back and look at our content and work to create content that’s going to compel people to raise their hand and say: ‘This is who I am and, yes, I want to hear from you in the future.’
“We’re investing in our own content studio, so we have people in-house who are living and breathing Dun & Bradstreet, what we do and how we help our customers. In the future, it’s going to be even more critical when you start to think about privacy regulations.“
3. Don’t just talk about it, actually create an omni-channel team.
“We’ve all talked about omni-channel, but, at the end of the day, there’s all these different tools that marketing organizations are trying to use. You really need to organize your team for omni-channel. It’s so important to have a team of people who are working together to pull all those different levers to go to market, versus having separate teams that are executing different tactics.
“There’s a lot of noise in the marketing space and teams are reeling from either getting cut during the pandemic or trying to switch to different tactics. You need to go back to the basics of making sure that you’ve got the right data foundation so that you can segment and use modeling to figure out who the right people are; that you’ve got great content, which is going to future proof you for where privacy laws go in the future; and that you’ve got the right organization to manage your customer’s journey and engage with them throughout.“
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