For the last few years, I juggled between becoming an accountant and building my marketing agency on the side, which I founded in 2018.
I have 3 topics that I’m passionate about. Separately, each topic is perplexing, but together, they create a new challenge.
You have to stay with me until the end. Everything will make sense even if it shouldn’t.
The topics are:
- Customer Oriented Marketing (Create and share value.)
- Marketing Control and Analytics (The accountant view.)
- Privacy and Data Protection (I can’t stand snooping.)
When I first really looked into marketing over a decade ago, the world was different then. Somewhat… Tips, tricks, hacks, secrets… while these are still around, now there is also AI.
It’s unnecessary to inform you about the distracting and invasive nature of the notifications and sounds from your smartphone.
For me, the major difference back then and now is that people didn’t care if and how they were tracked and monitored. And some still don’t care today, except for the annoying cookie banners.
On the other side marketers, agencies and businesses just collected and gathered data everywhere on everything. There were fewer laws, regulation, awareness and also information around this topic.
But cookies, fingerprinting and other tracking methods were already around.
While not only the landscape within tracking is changing, also the legal framework is shifting into a more privacy and data protection focused state. Where the common methods to gather customer insights and data are now getting blocked are becoming invalid or are illegal.
Anyone who chooses to provide value for others and sharing it over their website, blog or shop should be interested in creating a better user experience. Knowing what the users need, want, fear, desire and doing helps to improve the interaction. Practicing customer analytics by gathering these insights and data is vital, but not at all costs.
From an accounting perspective, there are only a few key figures that are interesting to measure and improve on. We will come to these later, but first I need to give you more context and nuances.
Marketers and agencies just do short-sighted stuff and swing around with some key figures and measurements to justify their actions and fees. These low hanging key figures show only a small part of the picture.
The tracked and gathered data nearly never gets compiled, sorted, prepared, and analyzed to make informed decisions. The issue is the absence of strategy behind these marketing measures, tactics, and methods.
New privacy and data protection laws are causing a shift and disappearance of many tracking and gathering methods. Especially with GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, ePrivacy Directive, DMA and DSA (you can find a summary here).
With the loss of Third-Party-Cookies and other technical changes from the big companies are also playing a big role in the shift to a more privacy first world.
This will bring up many questions, besides “How can you do the needed customer analysis?” Or “How to comply with all the rules and regulations?”
But the most important question for me is:
“What customer data in what quantity and quality will be available to make informed decisions for creating and following a customer-centric strategy?”
That exact question brought me to combine the three seemingly different topics. Running a business and doing marketing without financial awareness is reckless and foolish.
But most business owner and entrepreneurs are doing exactly that. They don’t know what their business is costing them on a monthly basis.
Not knowing what you will earn this month is a different and complex story. Anyway, with the right data, you can make educated guesses.
Developing a holistic business and customer-centric marketing strategy requires seeing beyond mere financial goals.
A system to serve and provide value for people with the help of employees, suppliers, contractors and service providers. When we consider all shareholders, we have a holistic view.
Countless approaches exist for business development, operations, and marketing.
But over my two decades of experience, I have found that having a customer-centric strategy with a defined and written out purpose, guiding principles, vision, mission, defined objectives and measurements leads to greater satisfaction (and long-term profitability) with a highly loyal customer base who are interested in joining your journey.
Focusing on the needs and wished of your customers while honoring their privacy, let them root for you and your success, which creates a win-win situation.
It’s an immense advantage to have less but better quality data that matters than a huge amount of data who can’t be understood and used.
To remain compliant, successful, and ambitious, it is essential to integrate marketing and accounting while prioritizing user privacy.
This way businesses and marketing gets measurable, plan-able and predictable.
If this resonates with you, I’ve written a Manifesto – a call to arms for sovereign entrepreneurs and business owners like us in how we seek to run and grow our business with loyal customers who are rooting for us.
There is also a section on what key figures an accountant is interested in. Which I promised earlier.
Coming Soon -> (Customer Analysis Insights: A Manifesto for Customer-Centric Marketers—Collect, Analyze & Find the Insights of your True Fans)
–Markus Winkler