Developing a First Party Data Strategy

A couple blogs ago we discussed the problem with personalization (spoiler alert: bad data). With the phase out of third-party cookies https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd to gather information about prospects and customers, it is becoming even more important to gather and manage first-party data well. The result of cleaner data will be:

better (more reliable) personalization,
a richer data set for analysis and targeting, and
a base set of data to inform marketing and sales
- build prospect personas,
- determine unique selling proposition,
- develop customer retention strategies,
- and more…

First Party Data Definition

First party data is simply information that is gathered through direct interaction from prospects and customers. It ranges from contact information to web activity on your site or social pages, to purchase history, reviews, and more.

Organize and Clean Your Data

Your data probably resides in multiple databases within multiple departments with multiple intended uses. The first step is to assess where your data is, what you have (and what you don’t) and how you pull it together. This assessment will spark ideas about what you can accomplish with your data.

Get More, But Why?

As with any project, you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish. Developing a goal for your data will help drive the project and the organization of the data. It will also open a key discussion: how will we measure success and what are our KPIs for this project (and marketing and sales in general). Yes, the bottomline is always… the bottomline, but what are the steps to that bottomline?

Retention (or more) sales to current customers
Penetration of the target market/market share
Understanding buying behavior
Creating new market personas
And so forth…

How to Get More Data

Separately we’ll discuss in detail how to get more data, but the categorical answer is: to ask and to track customer activity with your marketing.

Dang, It’s Still Messy

If you’re a perfectionist, you probably shouldn’t be running the data project. Data is messy, and you’ll never have 100% accurate or complete data. However, you can get enough data to inform decisions for your marketing and what data you want to collect in future interactions with customers. With a commitment to collection and management, your data can become an asset to your marketing and sales by generating new opportunities.

SLEckert