What is more powerful: Your first-party customer data or a partner’s third-party data? Trick question. What really matters is how valuable both data sets can be when they’re combined. Data Management Platform (DMP) and Data as a Service (DaaS) solutions can enable you to bring these data sets together for maximum impact.
Consider the example of a well-known pet care company that wanted to cut back on media waste and make sure its digital ads were reaching the right consumers the right number of times. It wanted to direct its money to the channels that performed best. Plus, the company’s execs knew they could do a better job of identifying potential pet food buyers.
When it came to which data to use, the solution wasn’t either/or. Rather, the pet care company paired its data with buyer behavior, household purchasing and audience demographics third-party data using a marketing-cloud-based DMP. The third-party data was pulled from a DaaS solution, also within the marketing cloud. As such, it was able to identify and reach the best pet-food-buying prospects possible with pre-roll, paid search and display media ads.
After launch, an analysis revealed that the brand had reduced ad waste by 60 percent, boosted ROI by 4.6 times and hit exactly the kinds of consumers it wanted to reach.
It was impossible to activate this level of targeting years ago because marketing was dependent on “proxy data”—data that has a tangential relationship with the desire to buy (i.e., demographic or geographic) rather than a displayed history or a predictable behavior pattern.
Today, with rich pools of user-level data found in leading DaaS engines, marketers can tap into data tied to online shopping behavior that includes searches, engagement with content, website visits and even offline purchases. This enables marketers to connect hundreds of seemingly disparate interests to an individual consumer and deliver messages that are nearly an exact fit. For example, when a big-box retailer was looking to reach customers who use its app and like the movie Frozen, it discovered that those consumers also tended to read The Huffington Post—information that led to a shift in media strategy.
This rich pool of DaaS elements is increasingly being supported by the inclusion of first-party data. This can include data that is gathered from CRM systems such as past purchases, site registrations, email lists and the like. Marketers can gain a far more multi-dimensional view of their customers by layering third-party DaaS elements over their existing data. This allows them to pinpoint desired audiences with better precision and achieve greater scale.
For marketers, these are exciting developments. DaaS and DMPs open up opportunities to craft campaigns with high ROI, which is likely to spur increased investment. But identifying, discovering and targeting the right audiences with more precision is only possible using data that is comprehensive and trustworthy.
