Why marketers need broad and deep data to stay competitive

Marketers are contending with a turbulent economy and are being asked to hit targets while cutting budgets. And with a razor-sharp focus on profits alone, innovation can fall to the wayside.

But with limited media resources and the rising cost of customer acquisition, marketers need to find new ways to maximize their interactions with customers. Customer data holds the key to identifying audiences, understanding their behaviors and preferences, and finding optimal ways to engage with them. However, brands are often lacking at having a robust pool of this consumer data – especially when it comes to having an end-to-end view of a buyer’s journey. Thus, marketers in these companies are left in the dark about key demographics and behaviors which can increase ROAS.

This is why marketers can’t stop innovating. To attain deeper insights into customer preferences and behavior, marketers need context from outside data partners. Those findings can inform campaign optimization around a more detailed customer view.

Here are a few ways marketers can be proactive in building out their data partnerships, how technological innovation can yield new insights from first-party data, and what the future of data innovation means for brand success.

Explore the horizons of first-party data from outside partners

To stay competitive, marketers must look for opportunities to turn their first-party data into larger behavioral insights across touchpoints. That challenge is a growing industry focus right now as brands deal with signal loss due to the death of mobile identifiers and third-party cookies’ looming expiration on Google Chrome.

By assessing overlapping consumers across pools of first-party data, marketers can uncover how their audiences behave beyond their brand-owned assets like websites, social media, and paid media. Data partners can include traditional media measurement partners, agencies, channels, and networks. But they can also include less obvious partners, like vendors.

For example, a beverage company who sponsors a professional sports league could engage in a data partnership with the league. With data clean room technology, the beverage company could start to understand how their customers make purchases at stadiums, how they buy game tickets, what preferences they lean toward within the sports league universe, and more beyond traditional campaign performance metrics.

Gaining new insights from a brand’s existing asset of first-party data by bringing in outside partners paints a larger picture that can inform campaign optimization, drive product development, maximize lifetime value, improve engagement, and refine the customer experience.

Brands shying away from data collaboration amidst budget cuts should consider what competitive advantage they’re giving up and how that decision could shape their future.

Prioritize flexible infrastructure for interoperability

Marketers can’t content themselves with the same data technology they’ve been using for years. As customer preferences and expectations change more quickly than ever before, getting a sufficiently granular view of your audience requires new tools.

With the dawn of new privacy regulations, brands are leaning into the power of advanced consent management platforms (CMPs) to ensure data safety. At the same time, as companies look to get the most out of their first-party data, the adoption of customer data platforms (CDPs) is also now a fairly standard industry practice.

As more components come into the mix of data technology, marketers need to prioritize flexibility and interoperability in all of their software tools. Companies will be looking to either integrate or enhance CMPs and CDPs, and it’s crucial that marketers prioritize tools that can support data collaboration across a variety of use cases and cloud environments. For instance, can the solution work with first-party vendor data to measure attribution and are you able to collaborate with the full scope of your desired partners regardless of the cloud environment in which their data lives?

Beyond interoperability, marketers also need to keep usability in mind when thinking about the data tools of tomorrow. Software infrastructure needs to be accessible to more than just the IT department or data scientists to really benefit an entire marketing organization. With a need to maximize media efficiency and effectiveness, it’s critical these tools are built for marketers and media buyers who need to have insights at their fingertips to optimize campaigns on the fly.

Prepare for a new advertising partnership model

As data collaboration emerges as one of the main ways to circumvent signal loss, more advertising deals will include agreements on data clean rooms and protocols. Contracts will include data collaboration terms, defining who can extract what value out of each side’s first-party information.

While marketers are often already eager to explore the possibilities of data collaboration, legal and compliance teams have more questions about privacy that can take months to hammer out before contracts are signed. Over time, this process will get more streamlined and standardized as more brands establish data deals.

To make marketers’ visions come to reality, next-generation infrastructure and applications will lead the way. Marketers who aren’t innovating around data and data technology will fall behind.

At a time when marketers are tasked with producing results extremely efficiently, gaining a broader understanding of customer behavior from outside data partners yields the granular insights needed to drive advanced optimization and business growth.