B2B marketers need to know their audience. But how do you get to *know* your audience? Through first-party data.
First-party data is any information a business collects directly from customers or users, similar to intent data that tracks behavioral signals to refine audience targeting. It can be generated from a variety of sources, including website analytics software, customer surveys, social media platforms and more. It is incredibly valuable and offers critical insights into audience needs, preferences and behaviors. With this information in hand, this data can be used to create and optimize marketing campaigns or sales approaches.
It’s particularly valuable because collecting first-party data allows you to focus on the issues affecting customers or prospects and generate insights into what matters most to your business. Because of its value and ensuring that the data is used in accordance with applicable law and privacy policies, first-party data should always be collected and used only in accordance with applicable law and policies..
We’ve compiled a guide to some of the best examples of first-party data, including details on how to collect it and use it. This will help you make the most of the data you can access, ensuring it contributes to improved marketing performance.
Benefits of First-Party Data
First-party data can be transformative in marketing, provided it’s collected, managed and deployed accurately. Its critical benefits versus second and third-party data include:
Accuracy and Reliability
First-party data is often the most accurate form of data available to businesses. This is because it’s completely direct — your business gathers the data from the source without interference from third parties that could compromise the accuracy. It’s also reliable since your business controls the research methodology and, therefore, understands exactly what the data means.
This accuracy and reliability are important, ensuring that the data accurately represents real customer or audience behaviors or preferences. It also means that any insights derived from the data can be trusted as influencing factors for marketing campaigns, minimizing the chances of misinterpreting or misusing them.
Enhanced Personalization
Prioritizing first-party data collection over other sources allows you to focus on the information and audiences that matter most to your business. This allows you to tailor the research to suit your specific objectives, generating personalized insights that are highly tailored to your target audience and your approach to marketing.
If, for example, you’re planning to create a personalized marketing campaign targeting audiences with a variety of content formats, you can use data from custom surveys, website analytics, and your email platform to figure out what formats will resonate most with your specific audience. This makes it easier to build and deploy high-impact campaigns that drive better-personalized marketing performance.
Examples of First-Party Data
There are lots of different types of first-party data, each one unique in how it’s collected and what kind of value it provides. These are some of the most common first-party data examples:
Website Analytics
Website analytics data provides information about how people interact with your website. This is invaluable in determining how effective your website content is at hooking, engaging, retaining and converting users.
It’s collected using dedicated website analytics software, such as Google Analytics, the most popular platform, or Hotjar, which allows for more precise and qualitative user tracking.
These solutions can provide diverse user engagement data, covering metrics including:
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- Page views
- Bounce rate
- Session length
- Conversion rate
Monitoring these metrics on both a site-wide and page-specific level provides critical insights into where your website is performing best and how it can be optimized further.
CRM Data
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are an excellent source of first-party data, offering insights into your leads and customers including their basic demographic details, interactions, purchase history and preferences.
CRM data can be managed manually or captured and updated automatically from a variety of sources, including website contact forms, email automation tools, social media platforms and customer support systems.
First-party data needs to be accurate to be valuable, and therefore, it must be maintained over time. Keeping your data clean and easily accessible by all relevant stakeholders can help marketing and sales teams identify high-priority leads and gain insights into how best to target them.
Survey Data
Surveys, sent directly to your audience or existing customer base, represent one of the best first-party data sources. They’re entirely configurable, allowing you to tailor your approach to ensure you get the specific data you need.
The direct customer feedback you collect from surveys can be used in diverse ways to influence marketing performance. Asking your customers what content formats, topics and distribution mediums they like most, for example, can help you customize your campaigns to suit their preferences better, boosting engagement.
There are many dedicated tools available to create customized customer surveys, or you can create your own and send them out via email. Conducting them regularly will help you keep track of your audience’s changing needs and preferences.
Email Engagement
Email engagement data can be collected from your email marketing platform, providing useful insights into how well your email content is performing. This information can then be used to adapt your approach in the future, boosting the engagement you generate from email marketing.
Most email marketing platforms provide automatic insights into a variety of core metrics, including:
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- Open rate
- Read rate
- Click-through rate
- Subscriptions
Email engagement data should be monitored throughout every email marketing campaign to ensure you can update your tactics to strengthen performance. Analyzing this data consistently will help you identify topics and content formats that perform best with your audience.
You can also use this data to inform your approach on other channels, taking learnings from your email marketing campaigns to strengthen social media or webinar marketing performance, for example.
Social Media Interactions
Most social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, provide in-built analytics features that offer valuable data. These typically track core social media marketing metrics, including likes, comments, and shares of individual posts.
They also often provide insights into your audience on the platform, covering their demographic details and key interests.
This first-party data can help you understand which content topics and formats generate the most interactions and how to update your approach to improve social media marketing performance.
In-Store Purchase Data
If your business has a physical location or e-commerce storefront, you can use first-party purchase data to boost your marketing strategy.
Individual transactions and broader purchase history can provide valuable insights into your customers’ product preferences, making it easier to target them effectively with marketing campaigns that drive repeat purchases.
With enough data, you can even build a strong understanding of what other products customers might be interested in based on what products they’ve already purchased. This opens up excellent opportunities for campaigns built around cross-selling.
ON24 offers a range of performance analytics features, including a post-webinar custom survey builder, that provide access to valuable first-party data. Get in touch with us to learn more about how you can use it to measure your marketing performance and drive better results.
