Sink or Swim: Cookie-less Marketing Strategy in Fitness & Health

Fitness and health brands must pivot and adapt in order to survive the harsh realities of a cookie-less digital world. Large companies such as Google and Apple have recently instituted policies and mandates against tracking with third-party cookies, and businesses have been scrambling to come up with ways to collect data and communicate with customers without these digital trails.

Personalizing your potential customer’s experience is a good way to ensure that once they sign up for your service or buy your product, they stay with your brand. Recognition and loyalty are two traits that are hard to buy, especially the latter.

Without third-party cookies, you need to activate and streamline your customer data sources, update identity-management solutions, and use AI (artificial intelligence) to personalize language and make each customer feel tended to and satisfied.

In the fitness and health industry, your current marketing strategy can be successful with just a little tinkering. Across multiple channels, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is even more critical to a modern marketing model.

How Does a Cookie-less World Look?

Before the push for increased customer privacy began, a fair depiction of how a customer might find a fitness and health product, such a stationary bike for one’s home, looked something like this:

David watches a video on your website about the features of your stationary bike. Cookies – the bit of digital data that visiting a website leaves on David’s browser – let your marketing team focus its ad campaign wherever he may roam on the web. The next time he stops by YouTube, a focused ad promoting your bike appears as he scrolls through videos.

Now, without the ability to track third parties with cookies, marketing teams must think in a new direction and come up with an alternate plan. Once your plan is formulated, it won’t be any extra work to implement this new way of thinking, which focuses more fully on personally driven data.

A cookie-less world has more authentic conversations and authenticity, which may be a positive change in the marketing world in general. By embracing Apple’s ATT (App Tracking Transparency), marketers can see the opportunities instead of merely the loss.

What Can Businesses Do Instead?

It’s hard to balance privacy with differentiated offerings, but you must if you want to appeal to a broad swath of potential customers across multiple channels. In the future, your marketing experts won’t have to match audiences via cookies across platforms, but they will be able to sync up audiences across PII-based data sets, either partnered or purchased, of which the main identifier is a hashed email address.

The most important changes you can make are:

• Focusing on PII-driven data sets to shape your new marketing strategy
• Streamlining your customer data sources
• Update identity-management solutions
• Use AI to personalize language

Here’s a little more about each solution so you won’t be set adrift in a cookie-less world:

Focus on PII-Driven Data Sets

Huge companies like Hearst embed identity tags into their first-party domains, ensuring a stable, broad customer base. Your marketing team can use a similar method, identifying individual targets based on available PII-driven data sets.

Streamline Your Customer Data Sources

It’s wise to have one identity ecosystem in which all your data is amassed so evidence-based marketing conclusions can be drawn from the information. Evolving around an email-based approach to support your marketers’ ad-targeting, your CRM, or customer-relationship management, needs a roadmap from which to operate.

Update Identity-Management Solutions

To adhere to new privacy policies enacted nation-wide, as well as the ever-changing atmosphere of the health and health industry, you may want to outsource your identity-management solution or create an airtight one in-house for maximum benefits.

Use AI to Personalize Language

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can hone your marketing language, changing minor details in the messages that go out to individual customers, so that the experience is a wholly pleasant and unique one for your potential clientele.

Give Creative More Space

What really must happen in order to survive and prosper in the cookie-less vortex that is the future of the digital industry, is that you as a company and as a marketer must rethink how you see your brand reaching its customers.

Six- and 15-second platforms, often populated digitally by young people, are wonderful tools to reach new audiences in your marketing ploy. Shorter content has been a proven marketing device, as it sticks in potential clients’ memories as well as other, longer-format marketing campaigns.

Change is coming, and the way you think about how your marketing material interacts with your customers on owned platforms, once they’re logged in, is crucial. Your marketing team can track customers and predict their usage and behavior, so take advantage of this information and create ads specifically for these loyal clients.

Wrapping up

How well you prosper in this changing landscape depends entirely on your adaptability and versatility. By relying more heavily on PII-driven data sets, rethinking how you interact with customers logged into owned sites, and introducing a streamlined, overarching identity management system, you can deal with any obstacle you face in the fickle fitness and health industry.