2024 B2B Marketing Trend Predictions: First-Party Data

We’re back with another trend, this time focused on how marketers do the all-important work of leveraging data to drive meaningful audience creation, run and optimize effective campaigns and measure return on our investments in both time and advertising costs.

That’s right – it’s a data story!

If you missed the first trend, it’s never too late to catch up! See our previous post all about what AI has in store for B2B marketers in 2024.

And if you can’t wait to learn about the rest, click here to get your very own copy of the full report for free.

Trend #2: The First-Party Data Party

The regulations start coming and they don’t stop coming.

First-party data isn’t a new conversation. In fact, many B2B marketers have been working on redefining their strategy to be focused on first-party data collection for the better part of a decade. With continually evolving regulations around tracking and data privacy, we predict that this discussion and planning will take center stage in 2024.

Why are we approaching the tipping point of the First-Party Data Era?

Because governing bodies and tech giants have been taking massive steps to give users more privacy and control of their personal data.

Let’s look at the timeline:

2018: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law goes into effect outlining new privacy and data protection rights for citizens in the European Union (EU) and European Economic Area (EEA), including regulations for the transfer of personal data outside of the EU and EEA.

2020: The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect; regulating how the personal information of residents of the state of California is to be handled by businesses.

2021: U.S. State Privacy laws; Virginia and Colorado enact major privacy legislation of general applicability in the United States to go into effect in 2023.

2023: With the roll-out of iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma in September of 2023, Apple began automatically removing tracking parameters from links you click on in private browsing, message and mail applications.

2024: Google will be beginning its long-anticipated deprecation of third-party cookies. 1% of Chrome users will see third-party cookies disabled in Q1 of 2024 as Google looks to replace third-party cookies with more privacy-conscious tracking that will allow users to manage their interests and become a part of interest groups of people with similar browsing patterns.

Apple and Firefox have already done away with third-party cookie tracking, but Google holds a strong 64% of the market share for web users and this move is expected to have significant impact on businesses as they look to redefine their marketing data strategy.

While many marketers claim to have high confidence for this transition, with only 41% concerned that some of their stakeholders don’t yet appreciate the gravity of this shift, we expect to see far more people scrambling to adjust as their performance metrics start to decline in 2024 due to a lack of targeting accuracy and tracking visibility.

The cost of this disappearing data?

Well, it changes the way marketers market—pushing more towards logged-in experiences to build first-party data and redefining new priority KPIs. We agree with the Forbes Business Council that we will see an emergence of customer feedback-centric measures in place of performance-centric measures. This includes NPS scores, customer survey data and experience diagnostics for measuring the effectiveness of our experiences to enable customers to engage meaningfully with brands with minimal struggles, especially in the digital space.

Explore the Rest of the Trends

Trend #1: Obviously It’s AI, Right? Obviously.
Trend #3: Video: It’s Still Totally Dominating.
Trend #4: Personalized Content: It’s Here to Stay.
Trend #5: More Marketing Forecasting, Please!

We love music here at Simantel, so you might notice some pop song lyrics sprinkled throughout the report. Did you catch the one in this trend? All Star by Smash Mouth (RIP Steve Harwell, thank you for being a part of the soundtrack to our lives.)