The First-Party Data Feedback Loop.
The story of the 1st party data feedback loop/virtuous cycle goes something like this:
- Collecting customer data
Digital marketing campaigns (across owned, earned and paid channels) as well as offline/physical marketing activation can serve the double purpose of putting the brand message in front of relevant eyeballs, as well as collecting first-party data. There are many tactics that can be deployed to collect customer data, including promotions, gamification, surveys, and more. We will cover more of these tactics in detail in a future blog post. The most important point to realise is, that even if your brand does not have an e-commerce or D2C strategy, there is plenty of opportunities to build first-party relationships with customers at scale
- Generating valuable insights
First-party data is analysed and modelled in order to provide valuable and actionable insights on customers. These insights help to understand the most receptive and engaged customers with your brand, how to predict behaviours and finding new audiences with similar characteristics. These insights and predictions can certainly be used in your cross-channel marketing activation strategy, but the most far-sighted data-driven marketers will also make sure to share these insights upstream with the right stakeholders so that they can be incorporated in the development of holistic campaign briefs, and in some cases fed into the product development cycle too.
- Informing targeting & creative
Insights can be put into practice, defining accurate audience segmentation and the right creative assets that will best resonate with different types of customers across media, social, email, mobile and all other available touch points that have a role to play in your channel mix. Insights can also be applied to non-addressable marketing channels, for example informing the planning and asset creation of traditional TV, print and OOH channels.
The link between audience segmentation and creative execution is very key here, and an area where many companies are still struggling to execute. Even the largest investment in data & technology and the most sophisticated approach to cross-channel audience segmentation will not generate significant ROI, unless it is fully aligned with an equally data-driven creative personalisation approach.
- More efficient marketing investment
As a result of the previous steps, marketing activity (both media and direct) is continuously refined using the insights driven by 1st party data, investment is more efficient, and increasing volumes of customer relationships allow for more personalised communications at scale.
If designed and applied correctly, this process results in the creation of a virtuous cycle, with more customer data generating better insights, which in turn results in better segmentation and creation of personalised creative assets which will increase overall performance of marketing activity. All resulting in marketers confidently increasing their investment in data generative initiatives across all touch points, which will keep fuelling their first-party data strategy.
At Silverbullet, we have spent many years helping marketers designing, democratising and executing bespoke customer data strategies for their business. If you want to find out more about our experience and approach, feel free to get in touch for a virtual coffee at andrea@wearesilverbullet.com.