WHY YOU SHOULD COMBINE FIRST-PARTY & THIRD-PARTY DATA

Thanks to data breaches, privacy violations, dark patterns (the list goes on…), online audiences are increasingly cautious about how companies collect and use their data. Their skepticism is more than fair – but there’s a catch-22 at play here.

Despite wanting more data autonomy, today’s buyers expect – no, scratch that – demand deeply customized online experiences. And how are these made possible? With personal data. 

Companies are stuck balancing a tightrope between upholding data privacy and delivering data-driven personalization. One wrong move and they risk alienating, not attracting, potential customers.
That’s why first-party data is becoming more and more popular. It’s privacy-friendly, permission-based, and grounded in mutual trust – so companies can meet both needs without compromising on either one. 

People who leave an active digital footprint on your channels have given you the green light to reach out. Building tailored assets and journeys from both the data they hand over and third-party insights helps strike a chord with them in a welcome – not unnerving – way. 

First-party data unearths your most engaged visitors. Once you’ve classified your company’s high buyer intent engagement signals, you can use these to build out lead scoring models like this one.

Here you can see how we score MQLs from content at Turtl, to learn how engaged our leads are. Organizations should experiment with lead scoring models, to learn the thresholds that work best for them.

Native behavioral insights flag hyper-interested leads, enabling you to roll out the red carpet and boost the chance of closing a deal. In RevOps environments, the ability to flag and funnel priority leads to sales teams is invaluable. First-party B2B intent data is the silver bullet to delivering better results – and third-party data is the gun. 

Marrying first and third-party intent signals can have a massive impact on pipeline outcomes – something 8x8 discovered when they mixed native content data with info from a third-party data provider.
The result? A whopping $1M in pipeline closed and a further $5M in pipeline influenced. 

Find out how they did it

Throughout the marketing world, trusted industry leaders are seeing the value of first-party data and are investing in platforms that give them access to it. Here’s digital marketing giant WebFX’s explanation of why first-party data is essential. 

More companies are addressing the need for direct audience insights by building data capture and analysis features into their platforms. BrightTALK, for example, provides real-time engagement metrics that reveal how users engage with the webinars hosted on its platform. For video content, companies like Vidyard can measure direct engagement in a variety of ways.

However, getting rich first-party insights from document-based content has always been tricky. Traditional surface-level metrics, like opens and clicks, aren’t strong indicators of intent. Trying to judge sales readiness from shallow interactions is a waste of your, your team, and Sales’ time.

Some content solutions have evolved to collect genuinely useful first-party insights that smooth out and speed up buyer journeys. Revenue content platforms source intent signals directly from content and integrate with your CRM to boost sales effectiveness.

With a revenue content platform like Turtl, companies can track detailed metrics for content engagement at account level or right down to individual readers. Turtl even feeds those metrics back into your CRM of choice, so you can use the insights to score, prioritize, and follow up on leads for better funnel outcomes – and bigger revenue impact.

Unlike the static PDF content of the past, with a revenue content platform, you can track and analyze all kinds of behaviors indicating buyer intent. All of these can help you understand performance, engagement, and intent so you can design effective content marketing that converts. With the right platform, you’ll see

• Who’s reading your content
  
  
• Which pages get the most engagement and shares
  
  
• Which pages readers ignore
  
  

These first-party insights can help you identify the topics, problems, and products of interest to your audience. Feed these into your data-driven marketing strategy and use them to iterate your content for stronger lead qualification and conversion rates.

For demand generation content, sales, and SDR teams, content insights like these are invaluable for identifying the best opportunities, proving content ROI, and planning campaigns.

Learn more about how you can use detailed content analytics to plan, iterate, and prove the business value of your programs – get our guide to finding more sales opportunities from content insights.

Marketers at Cisco used to rely on PDF download counts to measure content performance. It was a very blunt tool that didn’t offer any real insight into how content landed with potential customers.

With Turtl, the team at Cisco can now monitor and report on read times, page conversion and interaction rates, and individual reader journeys. By improving content based on those insights – and thanks Turtl’s psychology-led format – Cisco content is now generating 7x more engagement. And when engagement goes up, so does revenue impact.

It’s a similar story at Frost & Sullivan, where marketers have used reader engagement insights from Turtl to constantly improve content. As a result, they achieved 60% higher global lead generation on Turtl-driven campaigns compared to conventional campaigns.

And when Informa Markets wanted to scale personalized sales outreach, they knew they needed straight-from-the-source intel and a tool that did the heavy lifting. That’s where Turtl came in. Using our Personalization Engine, they created uniquely relevant proposals with a 90% drop in production time.

With the intent insights they got from in-content engagement data, Informa started identifying warm leads more consistently.

The result? Improved lead management, better sales conversations, and ultimately, higher conversion rates.

You can resist or ride the wave: first-party data is here to stay. It’s an accurate reflection of actions and interactions within a brand’s marketing ecosystem, and when it’s paired with third-party data, it delivers unmatched context and depth.

Every share, click, or conversion acts as a breadcrumb, and if marketers follow the trail, they’ll figure out not only what readers are doing but why they’re doing it.

When they say knowledge is power, this is what they mean. Armed with granular audience insights, you’ll create a super responsive and relevant strategy guaranteed to ramp up conversions.