We all know good data could easily turn around the results in the company’s favor. You can easily forge ahead of your competitor in no time.
Data helps in making decisions; it helps strategize marketing campaigns, it helps connect with potential customers, increase sales and so on.
But do you know, from where all these data are collected?
It is from different parties: the 1st party, 2nd party and the 3rd party.
So, what all are these parties?
Image Courtesy: Marketop
The first-party data is the one you regularly collect, data from different CRM tools, analytics, customer behavior and others. Now when you sell this first-party data to others, it is known as second-party data. Here you come in collaboration with other organization, that needs this data for their business process. Most B2B companies would prefer data from trusted sources, otherwise it could prove costly for the organization with a negative outcome.
This is a crucial method in collecting data, but now with marketers looking beyond the horizon, third parties have become a useful data source.
What Exactly Is A Third-Party Data?
Sometimes you would avail more information from sources that aren’t conventional or traditional forms. The third-party data is one such source. You have agents that help in the further process:
when your prospect visits other websites, you get the information. To make it more precise, it’s a spy that watches over your prospects, and informs you what all activities they carried out on that website.
These agents are called cookies. They are the small data created by a web server and track the activities of audience when they visit website. The information that it would pass on are the pages visited on the website, links clicked and other crucial data.
Just as the name suggests- third-party data means collecting data from sources that don’t have a direct relationship with the end consumer. It acts as the bridge between you as a marketer and the potential customer.
It helps in understanding the needs of audience who aren’t in your list of targeted prospects but could actually provide business value to your organization. You could further revamp your approach and re-strategize to target this set of prospects as well. This could help you create innovative location-based campaigns.
Some industries that can take help of these data are consumer technology industry, retail and eCommerce, and many other such industries. Many companies were initially offering their services to computer service industry. Later by referring these third-party data they realized that they could expand their business to other industries such as finance, retail and others.
What Are The Overall Benefits Of Third-Party Data?
The benefits that a third-party data offers are that it helps in better outreach. As the data is collected from not so traditional sources, you have the advantage of increasing your business results in the long run.
For example, if you’re a digital marketer, it helps you understand how your customers want to be connected, like preferred channel: Email, mail, telemarketing, etc. It makes your task easier in having better communication with them. A marketer can also gain more insights into the not-so-obvious behavior of their existing customers to upsell and cross-sell them. They can even plan the most effective strategies to connect with new customers.
When you know the conveyed and not conveyed needs of your customers, you can personalize the user experience significantly.
Don’t you think you have better chances of converting them?
Yes, you have!!!
You can increase your customer base with customers you never thought of. These untapped prospects could be high-end businesses across the world, who never approached you directly as they weren’t aware of your services or didn’t know how it could resolve their challenges.
As you understood their needs and approached with personalized tactics, they became aware of your brand.
Can Third-Party Data Be Combined With First-Party Data?
Many marketers have found it really useful when third-party data is combined with first-party data.
The advantages of first-party data are its relevance as you have collected it with best tools and methods. But the thing that it misses on is its outreaching process. The third-party data fills this gap and further optimizes the first-party data to give better results.
How Third-Party Data Align With The Current Marketing Scenario?
With the market conditions becoming increasingly competitive, it is a necessity for marketers to have data that give them the next-level approach with eureka moments. Sometimes they would be surprised to know how they have overlooked outliers- potential customers gathered from third-party data, crucial for the organization’s growth. Later they could reach out to them with the best tactics and add them to the growing customer base.
Inspite of all these positive results, some say that third-party data are in the decline phase. Is it really?
While they might say it due to privacy concerns but the reality is third-party data helps give broader exposure and showcases subtle requirements of customers. This is absolutely necessary as you won’t have it anywhere else.
How can one get third-party data services?
It isn’t that challenging to get this service but you need to find the best provider. For that you need on this checklist:
- What are their methodologies in collecting data?
- How do they comply with international regulations?
- What are their available segments?
Likewise, many others on checklist.
When they can give satisfactory answers to all the crucial points, you can consider collaborating with these service providers.
Conclusion:
Data is goldmine of information. Without having right data, marketers, sales representatives and others can’t plan the next step. They need to analyze before taking major plunge such as shooting out email campaigns, interacting with customers on one-to-one basis and many more.
The third-party data is like a dark horse that most organizations aren’t aware of, but emerges as a winner in this competitive race. It can be said extra-personal marketing needs of customers.
