The strategic use of data could be one of the biggest contributors to a small or medium-sized businesses’ growth, but many firms don’t realize that not all data was created equally.
More than a year ago, for example, Google announced it would be phasing out what’s known as the third-party cookie on its Chrome browser. Those cookies are placed on a website by someone other than the site’s owner, and can track how a visitor behaves on it — what pages they look at, for example, or what other URLs they click on.
While third-party data can be useful for companies that sell online advertising services, it has raised concerns among governments and Internet experts about potential privacy risks.
As a result, many organizations are now taking a closer look at how they can make better use of first-party data — information a company has collected about customers itself — or second-party data that has been directly collected and sold by someone else. (Unlike second-party data, third-party data tends to be aggregated.)
You don’t have to become an expert on all these different types of data, necessarily, but the distinction is important because data is the lifeblood of the customer relationships you develop.
When you have accurate, up-to-date and relevant data, it becomes far easier to earn customers’ trust, because you’re in a better position to personalize the products and services you offer them. With the right analytics tools, this can lead not only to increased sales, but an increased share of wallet among your existing customers. The right data can also simplify the process of addressing customer service issues.
First-party data might seem to require greater effort to collect, meanwhile, but in the end it’s well worth it. Once you have it, you can analyze it in many ways to achieve many of your company’s most important business goals.
The good news is that first-party data can come through a variety of sources. This includes:
The company website
It’s only natural for SMBs to invest much of their marketing budget in trying to get people to visit them directly online. After all, this is where you’ve organized all the critical information about your products, services, “About Us” information and contact details.
Websites do more than simply promote your company, however. Deploying what’s known as a pixel on your website means you can observe customers moving from page to page, much as you might if they were browsing around a physical store environment.
This means if a critical mass of visitors spend time on a particular product page, you might want to prioritize that item in your future marketing campaigns. Seeing a lot of activity in your site search? There may be other products or details about your company that are buried, and require greater visibility.
Over time, your website will offer a treasure trove of first-party data that you can use to learn an ever-increasing amount about what your customers want, and when.
The company’s email newsletter
You put a sign-up form on your website promising that you’d send customers regular updates about new products, promotions or even insightful blog posts about related subjects that interest them. And guess what? You’ve slowly gathered a robust group of subscribers.
The data from this source goes well beyond the names and email addresses that could be put on a spreadsheet. Your email newsletter subscribers will tell you a lot more based on their behaviour with each edition.
If there’s a lot more click-throughs on a particular link, for instance, that may suggest subject matter you should build upon in other areas of your marketing. When you see more people opening your newsletter at night rather than in the morning or afternoon, that may be an indication of when they’re in a space to think about what your firm offers.
You can also send out surveys to your email list, which is another great source of first-party data because (within reason) you can ask whatever you want.
The company’s CRM
Sales reps used to try to keep all the customer data they collected on their individual desktops, on spreadsheets or — worst of all — in their heads. A CRM can save a lot of first-party customer data that would otherwise be lost, and which could be used to improve their experience in so many ways.
Look in your CRM for insight about the common barriers to a purchase, for instance. Gain a better understanding about which segments or territories are growing the fastest. See how the typical budgets and buying cycles are evolving so you can plan a more realistic sales and marketing strategy.
The company’s social channels
Social media services became well-known for the third-party data they can amass, but you can glean a lot of first-party data just from your company’s accounts.
It’s not hard to see, for instance, what kind of posts you followers respond to, or how often they’re willing to offer comments. Even if the comments are rare, they are often completely genuine and highly specific.
Of course, you can also use your social accounts to track the volume of traffic that stems from a URL in a post back to your website, whether the final destination is a blog post or a product page.
Every time you expand into a new owned channel, your opportunity to collect more first-party data only becomes stronger. Launching a mobile app? You’ll get first-party data about your customers while they’re on the move. Hosting an event? Your registration list becomes a database all its own, and you can ask people to fill out feedback forms at the end which will give you another set of data.
Best of all, everything that’s been discussed in this post is as within reach for an SMB as it is for a large enterprise. That’s one more reason not to leave any first-party source of customer data unexplored.
