Social Media and Remarketing Ads
Just about every social media advertising platform offers remarketing or retargeting ads. These are ads that follow visitors from your website to the different social media platforms (or the other way around). They’re very effective and help advertisers create highly targeted and relevant offers. But not all consumers likely these ads. And, to be sure, retargeting and remarketing ads as they existed before GDI ignore the consent required for such usage of consumer data.
With GDI, serving remarketing or retargeting ads to EU consumers requires those consumers to have agreed to such usage of their data. This involves adding extra steps to your campaigns and sales funnels, which gives consumers more chances to drop out. Plus, this makes it a bit more difficult to market via social media to those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer, like those who have already visited your website.
If you’re targeting EU consumers, you must be clear where you’re using consumer data and how you track and disclose your compliance with GDI at each step of your marketing funnel.
Social Media Traffic and Your Privacy Policy
With GDI, your visitors will have to opt-in twice—once to accept your privacy terms before opting into your offer and again to opt-in to your offer.
Many websites have started adding popup messages requiring visitors to accept cookies and privacy policies as soon as they land on the site. It seems like a small thing, but it’s another step your site’s visitors need to take before you can get them to opt-in to your actual offer.
When you think about the volume of your social media traffic that comes from mobile devices, this requirement of visitors to scroll through or accept your privacy terms is disruptive to user experience before visitors even get to your offer. Of course, over the past couple of years, these notifications have become so common that website visitors are used to them, making it almost a thoughtless gesture to accept privacy terms and disclosures.
Limited Behavior Tracking
Google Analytics and other social media analytics tools give marketers the information they need to know if they’re getting a good ROI from their social media marketing efforts. But what happens when you can’t monitor social traffic’s behavior or attribute visitors to social media? While this isn’t a huge issue for most businesses, it could easily result in a lack of understanding of your social media visitors. Fortunately, Google has taken steps to be compliant with GDI so Analytics can still provide insight. For those who accept your privacy terms, at least.
If you’ve noticed changes to your traffic as a result of GDI, like drop-offs or regional data lagging, you may need to test your cookie opt-in to make sure that more of your social traffic accepts the terms.
What Social Media Marketers Can Do to Stay Compliant
By now, you’re probably wondering what you can do to stay compliant with GDI as a social media marketer. In this section, we’ll cover six areas you’ll want to address and show you how to do it.
Active Opt-Ins
If you are responsible for collecting, storing, or analyzing data for marketing, you can get started on the right path toward GDI compliance by offering opt-ins for people who are engaging with your social content. The opt-ins should be mobile-friendly.
The opt-ins that you use for GDI are going to be a bit more involved than pre-GDI opt-ins. Specifically, you’ll need to include privacy and compliance notices which could mean more than one checkbox on your opt-in forms to ensure that you explicitly gain permission for the types of data you’re collecting.
Explicit Privacy Notices
Social media marketers should include clear privacy notices on all marketing campaigns to ensure that consumers understand how their data will be used. Not only should the process be documented, but opt-ins and permissions also need to be tracked so you can prove compliance if needed.
Social Media Policy
It’s important for social media marketers to create detailed documentation for their social media policy. This should serve to educate your users as well as those working within social media for your business and needs to include the rules around GDI and social media as well as what your business is doing to keep user data safe.
Trust
It’s your brand’s responsibility to inspire confidence in your business and take steps to build trust with your users. If your leads and customers don’t trust you, you’re going to have a really hard time getting them to opt-in to your privacy policy or offers. Here are a few things you can do to build trust:
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Giving away valuable content. You can’t sell all the time or your users will get fatigued. Make sure that you’re providing valuable content to your users for free. This could be guides, how-tos, or fun content.
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Show real people in your social marketing. People trust people. A really easy way to inspire trust is by including your employees or customers in your social media marketing. You can do this through user-generated content, employee and customer highlights, or “behind the scenes” content.
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Cultivate a good online reputation. Your online reputation matters. Pay attention to social media and address questions, concerns, and comments from users to instill confidence in your brand.
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Engage in social listening. Social media listening goes beyond monitoring your mentions and can give you a better understanding of sentiment about your brand.
Security
Data breaches are a real concern when dealing with social media. You can minimize the possibility of data and privacy breaches by using only a few social media platforms (ideally the ones where your target audience hangs out). You can increase safety on your social media accounts by setting up two-factor authentication whenever possible.
Remember, you want to avoid data breaches. Working your way back into the hearts and trust of consumers is a lot harder after one happens.
Relationships
You probably already know how important it is for brands to build and nurture relationships with prospects and customers, but it’s so important we still need to include it here.
Building relationships on social media is easy to do. It involves reaching out, commenting, replying to comments, and just generally engaging with your followers. While social media isn’t the only way to build relationships, you can use social media to add touchpoints. And more touchpoints mean more chances to inspire prospects to act. Plus, it’s a lot easier for prospects to opt-in to a privacy policy or for an offer if they feel they have an existing relationship with a brand.