B2B and B2B2C marketers face a fundamental problem: Buyers will only purchase from companies they trust, but reaching potential buyers to build trust is harder than ever. This means marketers must find efficient ways to reach the right people before they can do anything else.
Marketers rely on first-party data, the information they collect directly from potential and existing customers. Much of this information is gathered during business operations, such as setting up accounts and making purchases. While first-party data is very valuable, it is not a complete solution for a company’s needs.
That’s where data enrichment comes in. By enhancing first-party data with third-party data, marketers can unlock deeper insights, improve targeting, and ultimately drive better marketing ROI.
Make First-Party Data More Powerful with Third-Party Data Enrichment
First-party data is foundational, but on its own, it can lack the depth needed for advanced targeting, segmentation, and personalization.
A survey report published by Marketing Dive and Dun & Bradstreet revealed that only half of marketing and sales respondents captured contact data from their buyers despite its value. That key finding helps explain why just 15% of those respondents said they had all the data they needed to accomplish their goals.
Third-party data comes from external public and private sources and includes multiple business and consumer data points. Connecting first-party data with third-party data within an identity graph helps businesses generate actionable insights for more effective B2B2C marketing strategies and sales programs.
What Is an Identity Graph and Why Does It Matter?
An identity graph is a database that links multiple identifiers (like email, device ID, and phone number) to a single individual or business. This creates a unified customer profile that reflects behavior across platforms and touchpoints.
For example, you might have only an email address for an individual. The identity graph might add a postal address, telephone number, and company ID, giving you more ways to reach that person and more ways to recognize them when they appear.
This expanded view is especially valuable in a world where cookie deprecation and privacy regulations are limiting traditional tracking methods.
“When you think about identity graphs, think about whether your company is looking for ways to broaden, deepen, and even create more value-based relationships with your current consumers or business customers,” said Eric Kider, Dun & Bradstreet’s General Manager for Sales and Marketing Solutions. “Knowing the types of habits, watching for signals, and leveraging those in a way to help improve personalized experiences really will create a different overall engagement model and help you optimize every single touch to current customers and prospects.”
How to Help Ensure Data Quality
Not all third-party data is created equal, so it’s essential to ensure that any third-party data you add is accurate and complies with privacy regulations. To help you select the right data provider, keep these key factors in mind.
Data sources. The best data providers collect data from a large mix of public and private B2B, B2C, and B2B2C sources, ensuring broad coverage and current information.
Quality processes. The best data companies have extensive processes to monitor the quality of their source data, standardize inputs, exclude likely errors, and find current values.
Privacy compliance. More than half (55%) of surveyed marketing and sales leaders cited “data privacy/security concerns” as a key reason that their company was not currently utilizing third-party data. The best providers document the origin and compliance status of all data inputs, to ensure they only include information that is legitimately available for sharing.
Cross-Links. The best data providers cross-link to multiple identifiers, including various “universal IDs” from data vendors. This enables marketers to build audiences in the widest possible set of platforms.
Transparency. The best data vendors are open about their data sources, maintenance processes, and other practices. This enables buyers to ensure that they are comfortable with how the vendors’ data was collected and managed.
Marketers should review these items with any prospective data provider and run your own tests to measure data accuracy, currency, and completeness before full-scale implementation.
How Enriched Data Powers More Effective Marketing
The goal of enriching data is not simply to add information, but to help marketers use information more strategically. Here’s where marketers can benefit from enriched data:
ldeal customer profile definition. These profiles are built by selecting a list of your best customers and then identifying their common characteristics. Adding third-party data helps make your profiles more detailed, so you can more easily define targeting criteria and uncover important trends and opportunities.
Intent discovery. When surveyed, almost half of marketers and sellers admitted that buyer intent data was important to them but was not actually available within their current company. Appending buyer intent data to prospect and customer records enables marketers to better match their approach to buyers’ needs. Watching how intent signals change after an initial interaction can provide even more insight into buyers’ concerns.
Audience selection. Third-party identity graphs provide connections to many different personal identifiers, which in turn opens the door to the widest possible range of advertising audiences. Identity graphs also help marketers make highly precise audience selections, enabling more efficient advertising campaigns.
Buying groups and deal tracking. Third-party data can provide additional contacts and new details about contacts already present in your database. This enables you to assemble more complete profiles for buying groups for accounts and specific deals.
Message orchestration. Enhanced data includes contact information for multiple channels, providing more options to reach individuals. Assembling this information in a single database enables you to coordinate messages across channels more effectively.
Lookalike modeling. The expanded set of customer identifiers makes it easier for publishers to match your contact lists with their own data, a critical step in building lookalike models. More matches can make the resulting models more robust.
Analytics. The more detailed profiles that result from third-party data enrichment support more detailed response analysis, lead scoring, predictive modeling, and other analyses.
Measuring the ROI of Data Enrichment
Data enrichment is an investment, but it’s one that can yield measurable returns. The relevance and scope of impact will depend on each business and its unique attributes. Keep in mind the following factors.
Expanded reach. Enhanced data can expand the number of contacts you have available while providing additional information about each contact. This will let you reach more potential buyers at the appropriate times. The financial benefit is increased revenue.
Better return on investment. Enhanced data enables more precise targeting and use of the most effective marketing channels, ensuring stronger return on investment. It can also reduce marketing volumes by eliminating duplicates from contact lists. The financial benefit is reduced media cost or higher return on the same media spend.
Lower data cost. It is often cheaper to purchase third-party data than to expand the scope and quality of the data you collect for yourself. The financial benefit is savings in first-party data acquisition and quality programs, net of third-party data acquisition expenses.
Improved sales effectiveness. Enhanced data enables salespeople to reduce time spent on low-potential prospects, focus attention on high-potential prospects, and develop more appropriate, attractive offers. The financial benefit is a combination of reduced sales cost and higher revenue.
Close Data Gaps and Maximize Gains
First-party data is essential, but it’s often not enough. Third-party data can strengthen first-party data to provide a more complete picture of buyers. Identity graphs play a key role by linking data from different sources and helping businesses reach audiences through a wide variety of customer identifiers.
Marketers need to ensure any third-party data they use is accurate and complies with privacy regulations. When selected wisely, third-party data providers can help support data enrichment initiatives, resulting in a highly profitable investment that helps improve B2B2C marketing strategies and business results.
When done right, data enrichment empowers B2B and B2B2C marketers to reach more of the right people and deliver more relevant messages. By making data work smarter, marketers can more effectively help drive better performance and outcomes for their businesses.
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