Why Is It Important To Own Your Data As an Agency?
When agencies have access to first-party data, they can provide data for their clients and continue to focus on the great creative and media-buying work they do today.
Own Your Audience: Simplest Form
Let's boil it down into its simplest form.
With all of that said and at the end of the day, what does it mean to own your own audience?
The data is in a list. You know who’s on the list. The list lives in something you own. Whether it’s a database you possess or your IT has access to, it's something that you can access.
It doesn't matter what happens in the world—specifically in the world of AdTech, with Google and Facebook and cookies. It doesn't matter what happens, since you own your list and no one can take that from you.
The Top Marketing Skill
In the mind of a marketer, the number one skill any business can have is the ability to build lists of their own—lists of people who are interested in what they sell, whether product or service.
As we always say, the money is in the list.
Only a small portion of people who visit your website or store is going to buy from you right away. So, it is important to build up your list so that you can market to them, moving forward. We are big believers in brands building their own lists that no one can take away.
You don’t have to worry about the cookiepocalypse, if you have your own list of data—especially a list of people who came to your website.
The Problem With Third-Party Data
In most cases, third-party data is inaccurate. It's not timely, and it's very expensive in many ways. So, why not own first-party data? You can use it however and whenever you want.
There have been a lot of changes within platforms, Facebook, for example, where you can serve ads and what you do with the data is limited. Why depend on others to hold your business hostage when you could own your own data?
How Do Agencies Begin To Own Their Data?
The biggest thing for agencies looking for a future-proof solution is to find a platform that can convert cookie-based audiences into real, addressable households, so their clients know exactly who is on their list.
It's important that agencies, and even big media companies who act as an agency in many cases, have a future-proof mechanism that allows them to create greenery in a desert. What agency wouldn’t want to offer their clients a solution to continue to transact services through them? Agencies would be able to help their clients buy media, create audiences, and then tell those clients who purchased from them.
All because you began with a name and address.
Why Start With a Name and Address?
When you start with the name and an address—whether that person purchases an automotive vehicle, a piece of furniture, or a larger-ticket product or service—you're able to finish and complete the loop there and really be able to determine what’s working and what’s not.
Agencies are result driven. The biggest way you can prove that is by showing true sales.
As an agency, you want to go to your clients and provide them with statistics of how many transactions you helped with. You want to be able to say, “We helped you sell X number of transactions worth X number of dollars.”
You’ll be able to track these sales, since you know these lists and what’s happening with them. What are these households doing? What are they clicking on?
Having a clear insight into buyer trends is important for agencies and big media companies on behalf of their clients, brands, and businesses.
How To Use Your Agency First-Party Data
Something we often say around here is “data means nothing without action.” People in the advertising and marketing industry talk a lot about data, yet they never show you how they use the data or how it can help your business and essentially make you smarter.
As an agency, you want to leverage your first-party data and grow sales.
The Steps to Using Agency First-Party Data
The First Step
Depending on how your marketing arm works, you need to invest in a technology service that transforms cookie audiences into households.
While you have information from previous customers, what about other sources of data? If you aren’t sure of the answer to that question, it’s time to invest in technology. fullthrottle.aiTM is one of the companies that can convert those audiences into households.
The Second Step
The second step, once you have your list, is to segment it down into what those consumers looked at. Here are the people you want to focus on, down to household, and then find ways to activate that data.
Now, it is not super easy to find the pipes and the tactics available besides direct mail. Most anyone can do direct mail. Besides direct mail, you’ll want to use things like video, audio, display, and social—all focused around household-driven data. It’s not very easy to do so.
The Third
Step three is to find sources for that. Again, at fullthrottle.aiTM, we knew this would be an issue, so we created both the means to transform those audiences into household data and the pipes and integrations. So, if you wanted to activate your agency first-party data with podcast audio inventory with iHeartMedia, you can do so very fast. You can also do that with Effectv, Comcast, Spectrum, and Charter. Typically, activation through these companies doesn’t exist. Through our partnerships with them, we’ve made it possible.
fullthrottle.aiTM is also fully integrated into the Amazon API, allowing you to interact with Amazon’s audiences, sending display and direct mail.
After You Have Your List
Once you have your list, you’ve segmented it, and you’ve determined who you want to focus on within that list, it’s important to immerse the households in as many tactics as possible.
If you have identified a set of 10,000 households, out of 100,000, that are looking at your products the most, it’s safe to assume they will be buying your products soon.
As an agency, how do we immerse the households who are currently considering these products?
There are a few ways to do this: when they listen to audio and podcasts, when they watch TV (whether it’s on their set-top box, in the family room, or a streaming site on their laptop), or on any kind of display and social.
Immersing them is important. You’ll want to explain to consumers why your brand is the best source and place and why they should do business with you or upgrade their services with you.
People often ask us how to know these steps worked. The beauty of starting with first-party data is that you have the list—you know who your customers are. If they bought garage upgrades, you’ll know it. You can compare customers who purchased to your list to see how many of them you were able to convert.
For some of the old-school marketers, this can be compared to Direct Response, in the way that it always used direct mail and email. Direct Response was hard to do in the digital age. Now, after going full circle with cookies and everything, we’re coming back to a place where you can still do Direct Response, which allows you to see exactly what kind of return you’re getting on the marketing you’re doing.
Why Is There a Data Famine?
Even after gathering the list of people who have already transacted, it is also important to recognize there is a first-party data famine.
Everyone knows they need first-party data.
With fullthrottle.aiTM, not only can you use the list and the customers you already have, but the technology also does a good job of helping you build more agency first-party data, due to the transformation factor within it. We can bring conquest audiences to people on your website and build additional lists of people who haven’t transacted with you—yet.
Where To Take Your Agency First-Party Data
It’s also important to know where you can take your first-party data.
As an agency, you might be wondering how to be forward thinking as the cookiepocalypse crashes down on us. You likely want to be a strategic partner with your clients. How can an agency leverage this technology to help their clients with their first-party data to make their marketing and advertising more efficient and effective?
fullthrottle.aiTM Can Help in a Few Ways
Once you invest and license our technology, you can place it on your client’s website. Our technology will immediately start collecting data. From there, you're able to activate that data through the system itself, similar to an ad-buying platform or an ad choice platform.
If you’d rather DIY the data activation, you can use our API system to download all the household data and activate it on your own as well. Most tools have a set of APIs.
If you’re an agency, there are a couple of different options, depending on your size. If you’re tech-savvy, you likely have a technology and engineering team.
You will want to invest in a license for technology like fullthrottle.aiTM, put it on your client’s site, and have the data feed back to you—likely through the same set of APIs.
Once you have that household data, you can use it to create look-alike audiences, right in your own data set. If you have a billion households that are in-market, now you can use your client’s first-party data and not just what’s in their previous transactions. You can use the real-time, daily generated household data to create a look-alike or to hone in on your 10 billion set right into a great targeted audience that you know will perform for your client.
Final Thoughts
Awareness is key. Understanding that if you wait until 2023, you likely will see incremental rising costs and a cost per acquisition or cost per lead type of metric.
You’ll also be dead in the water.
So, if you want to be someone who doesn’t end up in a famine and would rather be where all the great, rich first-party data is being created, it's important to be ahead of the curve on this one.
Steps to Being Ahead of the Curve
For those of you reading this, awareness is already the first great step. The second step is to champion that in your organization—ask what the plan is. Put together a couple of different strategies to help your organization avoid the data famine and get to a place of truth with rich, first-party data.
We have all seen the results when running campaigns with first-party data versus no first-party data. The conversion rates and the effectiveness of those campaigns utilizing that first-party audience have been off the charts.
It's so important to start now. Start building up that audience, so you can slice and dice and run campaigns whenever you want to. Because right now, if you're reading this, you are ahead of the curve.
The Importance of Awareness
There are not a lot of people who are aware of this or are even thinking about it. Now that you're reading about this, you have a competitive advantage that you can give your business and your clients.
Now in your organization, you are an agent of change, an agent of positive transformation. That's a great way to really help think about how to propel your career forward and help your organization navigate the best path forward.
Once you're ready to champion that change and really own your agency first-party data, schedule your demo here. Make sure also to check out the first in the series, Own Your Data.
