What Is First Party Data And How Do I Use It In My Digital Marketing Strategy?

As marketers prepare for a world without third-party cookies, it’s more important than ever for businesses to maximize their own first-party data and integrate it into their marketing strategy.

First-party data is one of the most valuable types of consumer information that a brand can have. It helps a business owner to create more strategic marketing ideas based around what your customers are saying about your products or services. It can also strengthen your business and bring more efficient business decisions to the overall operations.

To review, first-party data is the information that companies can collect about their customers directly from the customer’s interactions with a brand, both online and offline.

Here are some of the main sources:

• Website traffic and activity
• Mobile app activity
• Email database
• Text clubs
• Point-of-Sale (POS) systems
• Customer Relations Management Systems (CRMs)
• Customer feedback and reviews
• User registration
• Single sign-on
• Online giveaways, surveys and polls with email registration

From there, you can review the data to see the trends in your audience’s behaviors, especially as they move through the consumer journey. You can also identify different segments of your audience and strategize how best to target them and what kind of messaging would be most effective.

Tracking and analyzing your first-party data offers many benefits, including:

• Personalizing your marketing messages to consumers
• Targeting the right customers
• Giving you accuracy and control over who is seeing your ads
• Strengthening customer relationships
• Staying compliant with ever-changing privacy laws
• Being transparent to your consumers, which builds trust

Ultimately, tracking and reviewing first-party data is key for improving your one-on-one interactions with your customers, which is what digital marketing is all about. Instead of the old school marketing strategy of pushing out a single message to a broad audience, you can learn more about who your audience is and target them with the right message that will get them to become a paying customer. Better targeting increases the ROI of your marketing budget — and who doesn’t love that?

If you want to learn more about how you can leverage your first-party data in your marketing campaigns, reach out to Federated Digital Solutions! We can build a custom digital marketing strategy informed by your first-party data.