Seven Key Points for Global Marketers as They Adapt to GDPR

Hear the drumbeat?

It’s the steady march of data protection and privacy legislation. This summer, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took the marketing world into a whole new realm of compliance and reinvention.

With GDPR, marketers must now abide by stringent new guidelines on how to protect consumer data and operate transparently, allowing consumers both to see how their data is being used and to take steps to safeguard it further.

Some marketers see only roadblocks ahead. Others see opportunity—and so do we. But one thing is for sure: GDPR forces today’s digital marketers to think even more creatively about reaching consumers who opt into their messaging.

Global marketers targeting multilingual customers and prospects face an even more magni ed challenge. With so many languages, markets, and far- ung marketing supply chains to manage, it’s all too easy to stray into non-compliance.

As a global marketer, how do you adapt to this new environment? How do you adjust your message and media mix, facilitate a seamless and fruitful customer journey, and oversee your own operations?

Good questions. We’ll answer them as we examine seven key considerations for global marketers now that GDPR has arrived.

NUMBER 1

Starting the conversation may be more difficult, but it’s
a more authentic exchange (and may begin in a comfortingly familiar place).

Under GDPR, marketers can no longer contact customers and prospects without explicit opt-in permission from their targets. That means no email. No telephone. No direct personal contact without authorization— and you’ll face hefty nes if you fail to comply.

Sure, this creates some dif culty for marketers who want to make initial contact and/or start a dialogue with a customer. But it also eliminates the impersonal nature of the traditional “spray and pray” approach, in which marketers send email blasts to a wide swathe of (largely uninterested) targets.

Now, with GDPR, when you do communicate with a customer about a product or service, you’re a step ahead. Your customers have already con rmed their explicit interest and opt-in; they’ve placed their trust in you and permitted you to help them advance on their customer journey. You can communicate with them in an authentic manner that addresses their real needs.

THAT’S WHAT’S NEW.

What’s not so new in the wake of GDPR is where you’ll most likely reach these customers—that is, within the familiar con nes of major platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Apple.

Early activity indicates that paid advertising on these platforms is an unintended consequence of GDPR. This is somewhat ironic, as these mega-brands include some of the privacy nemeses GDPR was designed to combat. But now that GDPR has abolished trading on the free rider status of free- oating data, paid advertisements on platforms such as Facebook and Google are perfect outlets for consumer-hungry marketers. These tools have the volume and targeting advertisers still need.

What’s more, Facebook and Google now have the most robust security controls. “The smaller players won’t have this level of security,” says Dan Linton, Managing Director of Analytics at W2O, a San Francisco-based marketing and communications rm.

“Facebook in particular is attractive,” says Dan. “It’s a closed ecosystem that gives users full control over their data privacy when they create a pro le. No one can match the consent that Facebook has. If I’m an advertiser with a million-dollar budget, it’s much easier for me to say I’m going to spend my money on Facebook and not risk it in a smaller ecosystem. It seems safer, but of course, whether it really is safer is open to debate.”

NUMBER 2

Consumers control conversations with brands, but it’s the smart brand that responds in consumers’ native languages.

You’ve heard it many times: the web and social media have enabled consumers to dictate the time, frequency, and medium by which they interact with brands. The digital experience has catalyzed a tectonic shift of power from brands to consumers.

The EU designed GDPR to be a bellwether that further extends the trend toward consumer control. That trend is clearly codi ed in a June, 2018 survey by 3GEM and SAS in the UK and Ireland, in which two-thirds of respondents stated they would exercise their right per GDPR to withhold permission to share their data with at least one classi cation of company.

But of course, Europe comprises more than the
UK and Ireland. A total of 28 regulatory authorities in the EU can enforce GDPR compliance—and some member countries boast formidable privacy protection laws that pre-date GDPR.

“Germany and central European countries have had data protection regulations for years,” states Chuck Hemann, Managing Director and Head of Digital Analytics at W2O. “I believe, in many respects, this was a cultural phenomenon, which has often been overlooked by marketers. It needs further study, but it shows that marketing to empowered consumers in the age of GDPR isn’t just about technology and opt-ins—it’s about nuanced cultural differences.

mall wonder that many global marketers view GDPR as a particularly dif cult challenge:
How do you effectively implement multi-lingual campaigns and localization while adhering to regulatory requirements?

Smart brands drive positive interactions with customers from the start by engaging with consumers—and encouraging them to opt-in to
a business relationship—in their native languages. According to a Common Sense Advisory study, customers are more likely to make purchases when they interact with brands in the languages they natively speak. That means brands need to be proactive about interacting with a customer at all stages of the buying journey—from Google keywords to long-tail voice search queries to on-page copy—in her local language and voice.

NUMBER 3

Inbound gets a kick, and a transformation—with voice search playing a starring role.

Any marketer with a pulse has heard the rapturous enthusiasm that surrounds the idea of inbound marketing for years. The shift from outward-facing proclamations to inward-enticing contextual ads and content marketing has only become more pronounced in the wake of GDPR.

GDPR naturally embraces inbound, which rejects traditional, impersonal (and non-compliant) marketing methods such as email blasts, direct mail, and cold calls. And yet, the regulation activates a newer, better kind of inbound marketing—a new science driven by technological innovation.

That new change-maker is the rise of voice technology—and its happy marriage to search. That combination is already transforming how brands and consumers interact.

Consider that by 2020, many estimates suggest voice will constitute 50% of all searches, with 200 billion voice search queries per month. That’s no surprise, given that nearly 50% of people are currently using voice search when researching products.

Now just think of all the permutations and possibilities of multilingual voice search that circles the globe— indeed, in India alone there are 22 of cial, 122 major, and 1599 other languages spoken! Marketers now must consider the nearly in nite forms a series of queries might take, so they can attain “position zero” and achieve their desired results not simply in one language, but in 20+. The rise of voice search puts the onus squarely on marketers to understand the nuances of how their customers think and speak, so they can expedite the shift toward truly conversational marketing.

Consumers around the world can now simply speak, and their devices instantly answer back with precise, accurate information. There’s no need for lead capture forms. No need for prospects to wait for lead follow-up. Just real-time interaction at the moment and place of the prospect’s choosing.

After years of promises, the conversational, GDPR-compliant solution is nally here. And it’s living up to its billing, with even greater capabilities to come.

NUMBER 4

GDPR is all about regulations, but for marketers, choices are everywhere (and often very clear).

You should expect to see a GDPR-inspired realignment of marketing and media assets and priorities in which advertisers will now have to choose whether to:

• Selectively return to traditional outbound media. Don’t write the obituary for all types of outbound marketing just yet. Survivors will emerge in traditional media: TV, radio, newspapers,
  and magazines. Advertising in these media does not require opt-in permission. In fact, the marketing industry may see increased use of display advertising—for both online and of ine ads.

• Reinvigorate the traditional website. Your website is a known entity—drive people to it, and ensure you own any data they provide. Expect increased budgets for more robust websites.

• Run display ads, despite a paradox. Since GDPR stipulates that publishers can’t use cookies on users’ devices, ads themselves may become less personalized and targeted. That may be only a temporary contradiction of GDPR’s bene t of more personalized communications. Indeed, advertisers will likely seek out new methods and technologies for enhancing personalization within the strictures of the new regulations.

• Reduce the number of digital ad tech vendors. Are the intermediaries in your supply chain GDPR-compliant? If you’re not sure, you risk non-compliance yourself. As stated
  by Meredith Kopit Levien, EVP and Chief Operating Of cer at The New York Times,

  “You will see us continue to work with a smaller number of players in the middle...We think we will make a bigger, better, higher-quality ad business
  by scaling direct relationships with consumers. That means the continued reduction of any players in the middle who can’t adhere to all the standards of what we want on our site and the privacy standards of what we want

  for consumers.”

  • Shift data-collection from renting to owning. There’s always a chance that third-party data was collected by non-compliant means—without consumer permissions—so if you use it, you’re non-compliant, too. Better to own data, where you know the source.

  • Put personi cation ahead of personalization. Regardless of any new personalization wrinkles that may be GDPR-compliant, it’s still worth heeding the landmark research of Gartner’s Andrew Frank, who touted personi cation over personalization. His words are more prescient than ever, as marketers strive to separate the clamor for personalized experiences from the use of personal data. The key is relying on data that identi es what a person is viewing online at any particular moment—the core of contextual advertising—as opposed to using personal identity data, which may be GDPR-sensitive.

NUMBER 5

Marketing technology is becoming more centralized, but a marketer’s knowledge base must be extensive.

Your organization’s marketing technology must help you maintain GDPR-compliance while running complex, multichannel programs across multiple cultures, countries, and languages. Is your tech stack con gured for compliance?

All too often, organizations have assembled their marketing technologies piecemeal, as new capabilities became available. That results in a disparate set of systems that perform diverse functions, from CRM and marketing automation to content creation, emailing, analytics, A/B testing, social—the list goes on.

In the midst of this fragmentation, companies are moving toward centralization. Now, vendors such as Salesforce, IBM, and Oracle offer cloud-based marketing solutions that unite virtually all the technology tools in your arsenal into an integrated whole. Users can access all their systems and tools with a single log-in, without ever leaving.

In theory, this development should simplify any marketing initiative, including GDPR programs, and make life easier for the people who implement them. Why, then, are marketers’ jobs becoming even more complex? And why are the required skill sets becoming even more demanding?

Simply put: the explosion of data-driven marketing. Or, more speci cally, the staggering amount of

customer data that is now available to marketers, including data acquired through opt-in permission in accordance with GDPR mandates.

Today’s CMOs must understand where data, technology and marketing best practices converge. They must tackle technology stack assessment and selection responsibilities formerly exclusive to CIOs and CTOs. And they must expand their own core competencies across the marketing spectrum while ensuring their teams gain the necessary knowledge and know-how to move the needle.

Marketing leaders are not only assuming responsibility for global data collection and analysis, they are asking the following questions about their multilingual programs:

• Are new skills needed in taxonomies and ontology now that search (including voice search) is a ubiquitous global behavior?

• What about lexical grammar and syntax—and the ability to conduct lexical analysis—as they relate to a website that needs to be localized to a speci c country?

• How much do you need to know about Semantic SEO (Entity-Based SEO), the supposed death knell of keywords? Is your team adept at searches that provide meaningful results, even when retrieved items contain none of the query terms, or no text at all?

• Do you have the right data-driven attribution models across cultures and continents?

NUMBER 6

For multichannel global marketers, there’s increased urgency to develop the
right processes and find
the right partner.

GDPR has one important major bene t: it is forcing people to listen. In uential people in the C-Suite now hear your concerns about compliance and the need to retool and refresh

your strategy in a world with increased regulation, irrelevant borders, and a global customer base.

Like it or not, there’s a new order to marketing as we’ve known it. Your strategies and processes need to change from end to end, from the technology systems you integrate and the data sources you choose to the creative briefs you write to the vendors you entrust to create the voiceovers you need in Hindi and Urdu.

But as you adapt, you face the same reality as all global marketers: You can’t do it alone. When you’re responsible for marketing in so many languages to so many countries and cultures, you need a partner who goes beyond the tactical, and can:

• Bring strategic capabilities to bear as you face the challenges of global SEO; multilingual, multicultural, multi-device marketing; voice

and two-way conversations; and myriad other new norms that need to be considered in your campaign setup and design

• Integrate seamlessly into the technology stack in which you’ve invested—in effect, connecting to and becoming part of that platform

• Support this integration with human talent that “speaks the language of technology”

• Offer you best-in-class marketing translation, transcreation, copywriting, and vocalization services and capture local nuances, dialects, and idioms

• Provide you with the scalability to handle any global program or set of programs, so you’re able to market opportunistically when the right moment arises

• Help you run and operate your global digital operations while maintaining and publishing your content across devices, platforms,
  and markets

  Finding the right partner can be a challenge unto itself. At Lionbridge, we’d be happy to offer our insights on how you may wish to proceed with the selection process.

NUMBER 7

GDPR is a big challenge, but it’s only the beginning.

The changes we’ve outlined in this whitepaper are only the start. Many locales besides the EU are considering—and in some cases, already enacting—similar regulations to GDPR. Brazil and India now have legislation in the works. In the U.S., the state of California has introduced formidable privacy regulations. Others will follow in the not-too-distant future and create additional disruptions in the marketing industry.

There’s no going back. The regulatory genie is out of the bottle, and as a marketer, you need to effectively take steps to ensure your global marketing programs continue to be compliant and compelling.