Yes, that’s correct. The rise of digital products and services has caused significant disruption across many industries, and marketing is no exception. With the increasing availability of data and the tools to analyze it, marketers have had to adapt and embrace data-driven strategies to keep up with changing consumer behavior and preferences. This has resulted in a shift towards more personalized and targeted marketing efforts, with a focus on using data to understand customer needs and behavior in order to tailor marketing campaigns and improve the overall customer experience.
First-party data is a valuable resource for businesses that want to understand their customers better while respecting their privacy. First-party data is collected directly from customers through interactions with a company’s website, social media accounts, customer service channels, and other touchpoints. This type of data is reliable, accurate, and relevant to a business’s specific goals and strategies. In contrast, third-party data is collected by outside companies and is often less reliable and less relevant to a business’s goals.
By using first-party data, businesses can gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences that can be used to improve the customer experience. For example, businesses can use first-party data to identify customer pain points, track customer journeys, and personalise their marketing messages. This can lead to more effective marketing campaigns, better products and services, and ultimately, more loyal customers.
In addition to providing better insights, using first-party data is also important for data privacy. By collecting data directly from customers, businesses can ensure that they are complying with data protection laws and regulations. This is particularly important as more countries and regions are adopting stricter data privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States.
Overall, using first-party data is a win-win for businesses and customers. By collecting and using first-party data, businesses can better understand their customers and improve their customer experience, while also respecting their privacy and complying with data protection laws.
The end of data from third parties
Marketers can turn to first-party data to better understand their customers and deliver personalised experiences. First-party data is information that businesses collect directly from their customers, including information about their behaviour, interests, and preferences. It is data that the customer has voluntarily given to the business, rather than being collected through third-party trackers.
By using first-party data, marketers can create personalised experiences that respect their customers’ privacy. They can tailor messaging and offers based on customer behaviour and preferences, leading to higher engagement and better conversion rates. Additionally, using first-party data allows marketers to build a stronger relationship with their customers and to gain valuable insights that can inform future marketing strategies.
Overall, the shift towards using first-party data is a positive development for both customers and businesses. Customers are more likely to trust companies that respect their privacy, while businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and deliver better experiences. As privacy concerns continue to grow, it is likely that first-party data will become an even more important tool for marketers in the years to come.
Making your product the main focus of your business
In the B2B industry, it’s common knowledge that the majority of the buying process takes place without the brand’s involvement, and the pandemic has only exacerbated this trend. Relying on prospects to initiate contact with sales is not a reliable approach, as customers tend to research and test products online before reaching out to sales when they are ready to buy.
This customer behavior provides an opportunity for marketers to leverage product data to gather insights into how their customers behave, which can lead to a better understanding of the overall customer lifecycle. Product data can reveal which content or features users are interested in, helping teams identify key growth metrics such as increases in subscriptions, retention, and revenue. This information can be used to create marketing campaigns and new features that are more proactive and customized to each user.
Successful marketers recognize the need to shift from the old sales-driven model to a new product-driven model. Some marketers still rely on vanity metrics such as website visits, downloads, and total users, which lack context and fail to clarify the objective, making it challenging to understand the reasons behind customer behavior. By using first-party product analytics, companies can monitor and analyze how users interact with their products, enabling them to establish cohorts to provide a more personalized customer experience.
Personalization without putting more money into marketing
In today’s market, people in charge of marketing have to show that their investments have paid off. In the coming year, they won’t have the time to waste on failed campaigns. Marketing teams will need to be data-driven if they want to drive growth with few resources. To save money, marketers should try to get rid of tools that do the same thing and give priority to solutions that improve data quality and analysis. Instead of using one product to gather all of your data and another to analyse it, you can and should combine these functions to save money.
Data management is a big part of improving personalization, which can help your bottom line in the long run. But many businesses get what they need from a number of different places. For example, a business might use a customer data platform (CDP) to store their data, another platform to analyse it, and a third platform for testing and personalization. What’s wrong with this? When you move your data between different platforms, each step is a possible point of failure that could lead to differences in the data.
Start with the tools you use to create a culture of good data hygiene. This will make sure that all decisions are based on accurate, real-time data and that personalization efforts work better.
In the past few years, it has become more and more important for marketers to drive business growth. As long as the economy is unstable, all leaders, not just marketing leaders, will need to defend their investments and use data to help them make decisions. With behavioural data insights and strong data governance, it is possible to improve personalization without spending a lot of money on marketing or breaking privacy laws. The companies that win their markets will be the ones that can respond quickly to changing business conditions and grow in a way that is efficient and based on their products.