Trusting Your Own Data To Fuel the Personalized Digital Buying Journey
Discover how to find value in your existing first-party data and activate it in a meaningful way.
As the marketing and advertising world increasingly becomes cookieless, companies must rely on first-party data to run personalized campaigns. But this is not an easy task in today’s fast-changing business environment. Alex Southworth, VP and segment manager of digital marketing solutions, Dun & Bradstreet, shares how businesses can find value in their existing first-party data and activate it meaningfully.
It is hard to turn a corner today and not acknowledge that the cookieless world is imminent. While Google announced the postponement of the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome 2024, we know that it is never too late for marketers and advertisers to start planning for this eventual world to come. Marketing professionals know that deploying campaigns without a targeting strategy will function a lot like throwing spaghetti at a wall. They know that just throwing something out there and seeing “what sticks” is not only ineffective but also a bad experience for prospective customers.
For years, marketers have been tasked with trying to establish more effective marketing strategies that reach customers where they are. But the world is changing as we exponentially increase the number of online, social media and connected TV platforms we publish to and consume. Despite several years of warnings and the industry’s accelerated shift toward driving innovations that securely improve digital targeting and personalization, it is still unclear how marketers and advertisers will navigate the new world order after third-party cookie deprecation.
In addition, with the proliferation of data being procured as the landscape within the Internet of Things (IoT) matures and the recent evolutions in machine learning, along with more sophisticated RevOps platforms and intelligence available, there are a few key things to consider going into 2023 to better prepare your marketing strategy for the ever-evolving digital landscape.
See More: Using Data to Create the Perfect User Journey
Finding Value in First-party Data
In November 2022, Dun & Bradstreet released the findings from its 9th annual Sales and Marketing Data Report. This survey of about 600 decision makers across sales, marketing, and advertising teams found that 40% state capturing first-party data will be a top go-to-market priority for their companies in the next 12 months. In addition, 31% of respondents stated that inaccurate first-party data is one of the biggest hurdles currently impeding their progress.
In large part, for B2B marketers, this is because the great resignation has raised the difficulty of finding up-to-date contact information. Contact data is quickly outdated, leading to challenges not only in connecting with clients but also when trying to track and understand buyer behaviors online. In addition, between B2B and B2C alike, today’s privacy-driven world requires that companies comply with privacy regulations giving prospects and customers more control over what types of information they share about themselves online.
Yet the conundrum is that marketers know most customers prefer a personalized experience and favor brands that can tailor their engagement strategies to deliver a consistent experience across the myriad of channels they consume.
Marketers were accustomed to utilizing third-party data, which informed demographics and behavioral patterns to better contextualize how they served advertisements to their prospects. Shifting the focus to first-party data could be more beneficial in developing the trust that consumers are seeking and help your brand be more effective in today’s marketplace.
Mining the data your company is already gathering — utilizing your first-party data — can give you a better understanding of your customer experience. And based on how they interact with your website and their purchase history, you can improve their experience and deliver a more meaningful “relationship” that can increase their engagement with your brand.
Using your first-party data gives you an understanding of your customer’s behaviors, actions and preferences, enabling you to meet their needs and keep your strategy compliant with privacy regulations. Folding in these preference data points and utilizing a martech platform that leverages identity graphs can help marketers deliver more personalized outreach to their target audiences across all marketing channels and platforms with a higher match rate and expanded reach. Working with privacy-conscious addressable audience data while building in demographics, geography, and other attributes from both a digital and offline world can enable brands and advertisers to reach new customers, enhance marketing analytics, deepen insights and boost omnichannel performance.
With the speed at which data is accumulating, it has never been more important to understand what data points you need to succeed in this digital environment and then seek to find internal and external data partners and RevOps solutions that can help you navigate efficiently.
See More: The Role and Benefits of Big Data in Digital Marketing
Activating Your First-party Data
Every company sits on first-party data that illuminate insights into their customers’ preferences. It is now time to activate your internal data and do it in a meaningful way. This can be accomplished together as one team by:
- Integrating each team’s customer insight data (both accounts and people) and technology (MarTech, SalesTech, and AdTech tools) using an open and scalable revenue technology platform.
- Building a solid foundation of reliable data by investing resources (both time and people) into better data quality and data governance practices.
- Leveraging both first and trusted third-party data to gain the best representation of potential buyers and more effectively reach high propensity B2B audiences for multi-channel marketing campaigns.
- Adopting account-based sales and marketing strategies to identify, engage and nurture buyers who are on increasingly digital yet individualized journeys.
While the deprecation of cookies has created challenges for marketers, it has opened a window of opportunity for many organizations to rethink their data and technology strategies. It has allowed them to take a step back to find the best technology-forward solution out in the market today so that they can get out of the business of wrangling data and technology and back to engaging with their customers and prospects to drive growth for their companies.
The year 2023 will be the year that RevOps (or those teams such as Sales, Marketing and Advertising that contribute to revenue-generating activities) align on a cookieless strategy. Establishing the future-forward plan today is essential to a team’s success tomorrow.
How are you leveraging your existing first-party data better to run personalized campaigns? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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