GDPR – how does it affect B2B marketing?

As you may be aware, B2B marketing is something of a specialised niche for Horizon.

With the impending GDPR rules shaking up the way marketers are able to use people’s data, it behooves us as an agency to know all the ins and outs. But we’re also responsible for electronic marketing on behalf of our B2B clients, and for advising them on what the laws can mean for their business.

For some time we’ve been looking into this issue and encountering a lot of conflicting opinions out there. In short, GDPR covers use of “personal data”, but many people are saying that something like “name@company.com” is representative of corporate data, not personal data, and as such B2B electronic marketing might survive GDPR intact.

It seems those people may be wrong.

The rules state that “any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier.” In English that means all consumer data is classed as personal data. It also means that all sole trader and business partnership data is classed as personal data.

Furthermore where there is a generic (e.g. sales@company.com) email address, that would not be considered personal data, unless it is easy to identify that person from other means, such as the LinkedIn profile of the company (if it had only one salesperson, for example).

You can see what we’re getting at here – while there are some technical caveats, the reality is that – to be truly compliant – it’s wise to err on the side of caution and treat ALL data as personal data, B2C and B2B alike.