Privacy regulations have tightened, third-party cookies are declining, and acquisition costs keep climbing.
None of that is new information to anyone running a marketing budget.
What I want to focus on here is what those three pressures, taken together, are doing to the marketing hire your team needs, because the answer isn’t the same as it was a few years ago.
The pressure behind the pressure
Privacy regulation, cookie decline and rising acquisition costs are pushing organisations to invest more heavily in first-party data.
Each of those forces makes paid acquisition a more expensive and less reliable way to grow a customer base on its own.
Put together, they’re pointing marketing investment toward the customer lifecycle: CRM, loyalty, personalisation and owned audiences, where a business can build value from the customers it already has rather than paying to find new ones every time it wants growth.
It’s a commercial pressure as much as a compliance one, and it changes the kind of marketer a growing team needs.
What this changes about the marketing team you need
Businesses are actively seeking marketers with experience across customer data platforms, lifecycle marketing and experimentation, people who can maximise the value of a customer relationship rather than relying on paid acquisition as the default growth lever.
That’s a different skill set to the one a lot of marketing teams were built around.
A candidate who has spent their career managing acquisition channels well is a strong hire for a narrower part of the job than they used to be.
Adding CRM, loyalty and personalisation experience alongside acquisition is what puts retention and long-term customer value onto the team’s list of priorities.
Reading a CV for lifecycle capability, not only channel experience
When you’re shortlisting, look for the difference between a candidate who can run acquisition channels well, a common skill now, and one who can show they’ve built customer value over time through data, retention and experimentation.
Ask a candidate to walk you through a retention or lifecycle program they’ve owned: what data they used, what they tested, and what changed as a result for the customer relationship.
If a CV is entirely channel- and campaign-focused, with no mention of CRM, loyalty, or a customer data platform, treat that as a gap worth probing rather than assuming the experience transfers.
The practical step is to build customer data platform, CRM and experimentation experience into your next screening process as a named criterion, rather than treating acquisition-channel experience as the default qualifying skill.
Ask candidates directly how they’ve used first-party data to grow existing customer value, not only how they’ve found new customers.
That single question will tell you more about where a candidate sits on this than a full list of platforms on their CV.
Ready to talk about your next marketing hire? Get in touch.
Lilian
Digital Marketing, Social & Analytics Recruitment Last updated: August 2026
