Third Party Data – How to use it Effectively in Marketing?
“Knowledge is Power” is an adage marketer go by in their daily operations. And why not, when their operations depend upon client and user information that can be manipulated to develop campaigns that get the maximum market interest.
Programmatic advertisers depend upon third-party data to improve the overall campaign efficiency and allow them to make maximum use of the budgeted financial resources available. However, it is important to outline the overall marketing plan in order to identify how third party data can be used effectively.
What is third party data: Third-party data is the information available through data provider teams who work external to the organization. The third party data is collated from a variety of sources such as surveys, cookie-based tracking, public records and offline transactional data. The third party data is different from the first person data in that the providers are separate from the organization or industry and provide this information as paid data.
Why should we use third party data: Now that we have discussed what third party data comprises of, it might get the readers curious as to it should be used. It was just mentioned that this is information that is provided by someone external to the industry you are working to create a business in. Does it make third party data irrelevant? The answer is “No”!
This is because if used intelligently, third party data becomes a powerful resource that will help you analyze you client’s online persona, performance and purchasing pattern. It might look inconsequential upfront, but this information is imperative in creating marketing campaigns and follow up marketing emails that will create a positive impact.
Third party data, when rightly used can help analysis and evaluation of the market performance at large which will in turn help identify how to design the marketing campaign.
How to decide whether to use third party data: You have to understand that you should spend enough thought about whether you want to incorporate third party data while developing your business plan. In order to do that, you will have to analyze how using third party data will align with your business goals. You will also have to compare the cost involved and the benefit derived from the third party data to ensure that this is a cost-effective decision made.
A suggestion would be to use third party data if you are in a highly specialized industry as this will give you more data to work with.
How to decide on your third party data provider?: If you decide to obtain third party data, you need to identify and choose a provider. This is not as easy as it sounds and so here are a few pointers to help you along:
- Look for third-party data providers who collate and segregate their information and provide it in an organized manner.
- Identify the sources from which the information is collated. Is it exclusively online data, is it only cookie-based and what are the user trends looked into while collating the data are a few questions you might want to ask.
- The relevance of the information collated and provided is yet another important aspect that needs to be looked into.
If used wisely, third-party data is a great asset for marketers to engage their clients and improve their profitability ratio. All it takes is ensuring that you ask the right questions before you decide how critical third party data is for your business interest.
