Data-driven marketing has been popular for years. Marketing and sales teams previously relied on third-party data to measure engagement with their content and campaigns. Today, third-party metrics are fast becoming a thing of the past in favor of fresh, first-party insights.

Think about it this way: would you prefer a gold or bronze medal? First-party data is the gold standard of audience insights.

It’s time to move to first-party data – but how?

As major browsers transition cookies out of their repertoire, many scramble to keep a line on potential customers. Google cites privacy concerns as the driving motivator behind third-party tracking data’s demise, although some skeptics think it’s more likely that they’re trying to regain their iron grip on online advertising. Whatever the reason, the reality is we need to turn inward for answers. The writing is on the wall: the days of third-party engagement metrics are over.

Without third-party tracking, targeting, retargeting, and measuring, ad performance gets increasingly difficult. Today’s consumers want greater control over their data and who has access to it. That’s why companies are turning to first-party data in droves. Collecting information directly from your website, content, and other digital assets is a more reliable and privacy-compliant alternative to the current situation.

But despite wanting more data autonomy, today’s customers expect personalization now more than ever. They crave relevant, targeted content. And what better way to deliver tailored buyer journeys than with data that they’ve given you? Brands that respond to data-driven marketing trends and harness the power of freely shared insights, will come out as winners.

By nature, first-party data lends itself to permission-based marketing. Readers who willingly provide details have given you the green light to reach out. It’s a lot easier to customize a joy-sparking, trust-building buyer journey with information that wasn’t scraped from some faraway source.

First-party data and intent

First-party data also 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 for business-to-business firms.

Watch our webinar How to use digital content to judge buyer intent and influence B2B decisions.

A new age of audience insights

Some solutions are beginning to address this need for direct audience insights. 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 engagement in a variety of ways.

However, measuring engagement with document-based content has always been tricky. Traditional, surface-level engagement metrics (those good old opens and clicks) didn’t offer meaningful insights – and they’re about to become obsolete anyway.

For far too long, marketing and sales teams have been in the dark about engagement with their content. With the end of third-party tracking upon us, it’s first-party tracking’s time in the spotlight.

Don’t just take our word for it. Throughout the marketing world, more and more trusted industry leaders are waving the flag for first-party data – especially with the cookie jar soon to run dry. Here’s digital marketing giant WebFX’s explanation of why first-party data is elite.

Content performance from first-party

With a content automation platform like Turtl, brands 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. That way you can use the insights to score, prioritize, and follow up on leads.

Unlike the static PDF content of the past, with a content automation platform, you can track and analyze all kinds of behaviors. 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 metrics can help you to identify the topics, problems, and products of interest to individuals. You can then implement data-driven personalization and iterate your essaying to improve lead qualification and conversions.

For demand generation content, sales, and SDR teams, content engagement 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.

First-party engagement data in action

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 engagement insights.

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 to the compelling nature of Turtl’s format compared to PDF – Cisco content is now generating 7x more engagement.

Click to read Cisco + Turtl | Case Study

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.

Click to read Frost & Sullivan + Turtl | Case Study

Sales teams are getting real value from first-party metrics from Turtl too. At Willis Towers Watson, salespeople track content engagement in real-time. This gives them powerful insights into who their most engaged prospects are, leading to unprecedented levels of sales opportunities.

Click to read Willis Towers Watson + Turtl | Case Study

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.

Click to read Informa Markets + Turtl | Case Study

Turtl takeaway

You can resist or ride the wave: first-party data is the future. It’s an accurate reflection of actions and interactions with a brand’s marketing ecosystem and it gives context and depth that just can’t be matched by external intent data providers.

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.