Why iOS15 Can Build Better Marketing

Recently, Apple launched a new operating system for the more than 1 billion iPhones currently in use. This release, known as iOS15 has corresponding updates for tablets (iPadOS 15), desktop and laptops (macOS Monterey), and wearables (watchOS 8), has caused quite a bit of commotion in the digital marketing community due to the enhanced privacy settings options available to users. These privacy settings, touted as new features to help users control and monitor an app's use of their data, present severe limitations to marketers who have depended on app data to drive and enhance their digital marketing and email campaigns.

As someone with a long history of small business email marketing (dating back to the last century), I’m not thrilled with the new update, but unlike some of my younger colleagues, I’m less concerned about how this loss of user data will affect my overall campaign results. Data can make us clever, but it doesn’t necessarily make us smart. 

Clever data offers...

• Tracking that helps to anticipate a user’s next action based on their last action

• Leveraging of every aspect of technology to interact with your target at any location or point in time

• The opportunity to out-think your customer with your marketing messages through aggregated data that most users have little awareness of

Don’t get me wrong, this is pretty amazing stuff. It was the kind of thing we dreamed of in the early days of the dot-com boom, when we saw the potential for leveraging ads, emails and website visits to boost our bottom line. 

But before we had that kind of data, or any type of similar opportunity, running successful campaigns depended on being smart. Smart marketing means...

• Knowing and understanding deeply who your customers are

• Empathizing with what your customers care about and what concerns them

• Offering your customers what they need, when they need it; not based on lurking in the background and monitoring their activity, but through a clear understanding of their circumstances and how to make their life/work/problem better
  

iOS 15 limits our ability to be clever. 

It does not hamper our ability to be smart marketers. 

Smart marketers do not need secretive data tracking or constant monitoring to know what their customers want or need. Smart marketers already know this before they send the first email or run the first ad. Smart marketers have done the research. They have talked to their audience (yes, I mean actual customer interviews). Smart marketers work alongside the development or production team to understand the real world problems that their company solves. Smart marketers can leverage clever data, but they don’t need it to be successful.

More than anything, smart marketers look to the end results, the true ROI (return on investment) to calculate the effectiveness of their work. If you understand how to do the homework, how to calculate the real results of your processes, then you don’t need clever data to know that your marketing is working. You will have real, hard evidence of your effectiveness based on measures that actually lift your bottom line. 

Is your marketing strategy clever, smart or both? If it’s only clever, beware. iOS 15 will likely hurt your campaign results. But if you’re smart, even if you were leaning a little bit on that clever data, you’ll be OK. You might experience a rocky road to settle your measurement systems over the next few months, but you’ll be fine. Your marketing is based on more than slick data, it’s based on what your customer really wants and needs. And that is never a recipe for failure.