What and who you know

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Good morning, Marketers, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

That’s an old truism, but it gains new meaning when it comes to privacy and data-driven marketing. 

The customers you know, you’ve built a relationship with them. They’ve contacted you for advice about a product or problem to solve. You’ve followed up with a message when it came in handy for them. You’ve become a trusted source, and they feel like you know them. You’ve personalized, but without being too creepy or out of left field.

For customers lower on this ideal spectrum, you might have their data in a privacy compliant way. But do they feel like you know them? If they don’t feel that way, it doesn’t matter what you know about them. Because the real actionable data is the data you use to build value in the customer relationship. It also helps to communicate transparently about how you know what you know.

Chris Wood,

Editor

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.