5 Reasons why you should LOVE GDPR & Data Protection

While the scare stories are rife about the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its enforcement, with three months to go, I believe it’s important to pause and consider why data protection regulation can be a force for good marketing and a positive for your business. Here’s my quick five:

1. The GDPR is based on principles of transparency, accuracy, fairness, minimization, and security. Assuming your business actually wants to do the right thing by people, aren’t these principles a no-brainer? Applied properly, the spirit of the regulation should lead you to better business practice, more robust processes and build greater trust with your customers, your people, your business stakeholders. Data protection regulation recognises that people own their data and have the right to expect that it is carefully managed by those businesses they choose to share it with. Trusted brands can lead the way in supporting that right and become careful custodians of personal data.
2. Using clean, first party data in your marketing means you will have prospects who actually want to hear from you, about your product. This means you can be more targeted, more focussed and that should lead to better engagement with your brand. I love the simplicity of that.
3. Privacy by design should encourage organisations to build data protection and security into the very heart of their infrastructure (be that in the cloud, on premise, or outsourced). This should trigger a step-change in how businesses view security, hopefully prompting businesses to align their strategies better with the security agenda, and thus be better prepared for an inherently insecure future.
4. The regulations mean that many businesses are forced to reassess the data they use for marketing, and some of that will prove to be a liability rather than an asset. This will no doubt lead to brands looking at other marketing tactics and innovation (whether that’s better social media marketing or in-bound campaigns), and ultimately refreshing and improving their approach.
5. Change can be certainly be challenging, but it often makes way for innovation. The regulations can be an opportunity for your businesses to reassess and improve your data capability and strategy; for example with streamlined and centralised modern CRMs as opposed to disparate and fragmented data sets. When you get through this tricky period of compliance, you should find you are better prepared for a digital and data future.

Good businesses embrace change and use it to learn, to trigger growth, to tackle legacy thinking and systems which no longer serve them; great brands are built on trust. Data protection regulation is about gearing up for the future data and digital economy and it’s about trust. So time to get on board: adapt to a future where personal data is treated more carefully and security is higher on the board agenda; comply to build your brand equity, and ultimately your competitive edge.

Want to learn more? Join my GDPR one day Masterclass for busy professionals in Edinburgh on 29th March.