Digital Marketing

How to Market with Third Party Data

October 8, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

Now, more than ever, an extreme amount of data is being generated about customers. There is tons and tons of data out there and third party data providers are your key to harnessing it all. Here’s how to do it:

But first, a little refresher:

What is Third Party Data and How Do I Use It?

Third parties are entities that are not directly connected to the user whose data is being collected. Third party data providers often pay businesses, publishers and others to collect data about their customers and users.

This data often includes:

- Social media information
- Web pages visited
- Purchases made
- Address or other personal information

What can this kind of information teach you? In addition to showing you more about your target customers, it can also tell you how they want to be contacted and where they tend to hang out.

With that being said, there are lots of different ways to use this information to your marketing advantage, including:

Refine Your Audience with Third Party Data

By using third party data, your audience will save a great deal of time. That’s because you can specify exactly what kind of data you want. Want to target your ad to families who have been searching for bathroom remodeling in a certain zip code? You can do that without having to collect any of that data yourself.

Gather Detailed Insights About Your Audience

In addition to being able to purchase refined data about your audience, third party data marketing can also teach you some unique things you may not have known about them.

Maybe you already know that your target audience is young mothers from the ages of 20-30 who are pregnant for the first time. But what you don’t know (and what third party ads can tell you) is that these young women often browse and shop using their mobile phone and tend to prefer certain well-known brand names.

This information could unlock new possibilities for partnerships, joint ventures or other ad ideas that you may not have considered prior to having this information available.

Deliver a Personalized User Experience

Personalization is important now more than ever, and is a key driver in creating a satisfying user experience. Using the information you get from third party data vendors, you can personalize messages based on everything from device to age to location and more. From there, segmenting your audiences is simple and straightforward and you can tailor your ads accordingly.

Don’t Hesitate to Contact Workdom for Help!

As you continue to market and watch your campaign performance, you’ll start to gain valuable insights into your audience which will in turn help you zero in on the data that’s right for you. With a combination of both first party and third party data, you can squeeze every drop of value out of all of your digital marketing initiatives.

And if you need help, our on-demand chat-based team is ready to assist! Contact the experts at Workdom today to learn more about how we can help you collect and market using various types of data for your marketing campaigns.

What’s the Difference Between First, Second and Third Party Data and Why Does it Matter?

October 5, 2021 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

Your marketing campaign is only as successful as the data behind it. And depending on the type of marketing you’re doing and the types of campaigns you’re running, some types of data will matter more to you than others.

But before we jump into that, it’s important to understand the different types of data and how they are used, so that you can confidently implement the right type of tracking and performance measurement in your marketing campaigns.

What is 1st Party Data?

First party data is the information you collect directly from your customers. This includes data in your CRM as well as subscription data (if applicable) and social data. Any behavior that the user completes across your websites, such as completing a survey or filling out a form, is also considered first party data.

The problem with this data, as rich as it is, is that it lacks scale. It is the collective habits, actions and interests of every person and their interactions on your site or app. But in order to make concrete observations based on the data, first party data can be truly invaluable. It’s also available for free.

Taking actionable steps using first party data can help drastically improve ROI, improve engagement and build better relationships with your customers.

What is 2nd Party Data?

Second party data, in a nutshell, is someone else’s first party data. You can simply purchase this data from the source that owns it, and feel confident about its accuracy. Second party data can include a user’s activity on a website or how they use a mobile app. It can also include social media and things like completed surveys and forms.

In order to access this data, you’ll need to forge a relationship with the company that has the data. It’s worth noting that second party data is a relatively new idea and is not as commonly used as first and third party data, but with the right data, you may be able to tap into a goldmine of information that can help you tailor your marketing campaigns more accurately.

Second party data is also more accurate than if you pulled the data from an amalgamation of different sources. It also has all the benefits of first-party data, but at a scale that you may not be able to get on your own.

What is 3rd Party Data?

Third party data is data that you can buy from sources that are not the original collectors of that information, rather they are data aggregators that pull the information from websites that
gathered it. The aggregator, in turn, pays the publisher or website owner that generates this data.

Third party data is often bought and sold on a larger scale and is ideal for enhancing your existing third party data as well as expanding your audience across different data points than what you could do entirely on your own.

When buying third party data, it’s important to consider the kind of data that’s actually being offered. For example, there’s declared data, which is information knowingly provided by a user, inferred data, which is gleaned from their activity, and observed data, which is gathered by tracking the pages they visit.

Which Type of Data is The Best?

As you can see, each type of data has its own merits and occasional drawbacks or, at the very least, points to keep in mind so that you can tailor your campaigns with better precision. At the same time, understanding which type of data will work best takes a great deal of marketing experience and a deep understanding of the end goals you want to achieve.

If you have any questions about advertising, in using first and third party data effectively and want to get more out of your existing campaigns, contact our experts at Workdom today. Let us help you develop rich data profiles that you can draw upon with absolute confidence, improving your ROI, your conversion rate and your profits in the process.

Can AI Really Deliver Smarter Marketing Automation?

September 27, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

AI brings a wide range of opportunities to the underlying intelligence needed to conduct marketing campaigns. But how does it all work and how can you use it to grow your own business? Let’s take a closer look.

Why Use AI in Marketing Automation?

AI in marketing automation brings a number of benefits to your optimization strategies. First and foremost, trying to manage all of your marketing efforts is a LOT of work. Even if you have lean, mean MarTech stack, the potential for errors is still high. AI can help you save time, minimize errors and enhance productivity considerably.
Plus, if the marketing message you’re sending out to prospects is a mismatch in some way, your users are simply going to ignore it. It’s not relevant to them, so they expect nothing from it. Using AI in your marketing automation can help ensure that your messaging is taking the right product or service and tailoring it to the right audience at the right stage of your sales funnel.

How Can You Use AI to Improve Automation?

Before you leap into fully embracing AI and marketing automation, it’s important to consider how you’ll be using it in your business. You don’t want to hand off everything to AI, right out of the gate ( (as tempting as that would be!). As with any big shift like this, you want to start out small and test. Don’t buy into all of the hype that AI can and will replace everything in your business — it won’t. But the things it CAN replace will definitely save you hours of time.

To that end, you’ll want to take a close look at your MarTech stack and your outstanding to-dos and figure out where AI and automation figure into the equation. There are a lot of questions to ask before you jump in — how easy is the technology to use? How will it integrate with your existing solutions? Will it replace any of those solutions? You’ll need to prioritize the areas where the technology will have the biggest and most measurable impact.

It’s not a bad idea to get buy-in from the higher-ups in your organization, with the understanding that AI isn’t going to replace or steal anyone’s job. You’ll still need people to help to train the AI and teach it to help them in their work, not take it over. AI works best when there is a plan and a purpose in place, and it’s up to you to provide that. Finally, in getting everyone on board, it’s understandable to be excited about AI — it really CAN be incredible when used right. But there’s a lot of hype out there, and it’s a good idea to work with a company that can guide you in having realistic expectations.

Reliable Data Means Reliable Results

Even if you feel like you’re not quite ready to embrace AI wholeheartedly, it’s not going away. In fact, together with marketing innovation, you can expect AI to deal with a lot of heavy-lifting of the “if this, then that” types of marketing automation. Expect to see a lot of overlap between account-based marketing strategies and lead generation, creating a sort of hybrid that will depend on the company’s boals, target audience, sales enablement, sales engagement and more.

This type of focus in turn will have a ripple effect in measuring marketing performance, as well as the analytics of the customer journey among other things. To be sure, these are exciting times we’re living in. Taking steps to combine marketing automation with AI can have a profound impact on your business while increasing your efficiency while providing you with even more actionable, verifiable data.

But you don’t have to go it alone. At Workdom, our expertise in helping to identify your MarTech stack as well as where AI and marketing automation can fit in can help you create realistic expectations for the role that this exciting technology will play in your specific business. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you with your marketing automation and AI integration.

What to Do When Your Brand Reputation is On the Line

September 3, 2021 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business for a year or several decades. Inevitably something will go wrong and it will all come back to hit you like an avalanche. Whether it’s a disgruntled customer, or a media mishap, your brand reputation can sour quickly, which is why it’s so important to have a strategy in place to deal with dust-ups that can cause customers to flock to your competition.

So what can you do to not only successfully fight the flames but also prevent them? Let’s take a closer look:

Do a Deep Audit of Your Name and Your Business Name

The very first step in claiming (or reclaiming) your brand reputation is to do a deep dive on what’s out there about you and your business name. If something happened on social media years ago, don’t put it past a competitor or even the media to dredge it up and try to make an issue out of it, which can leave you scrambling.

Doing a deep audit of your name and business name can help you get a solid starting point to work from, and it’s never a bad idea to go beyond the first page of Google to see what’s being said. The last thing you want is for old comments to come back and haunt you!

Once you’ve figured out a good starting point (or even if you’re just getting started and want to avoid this kind of reputation disaster in the future, it’s time to take the next step and…

Claim Your Profiles

Claiming your profiles across all major social networks and search engines can help prevent other businesses from capitalizing on your good name or even worse, purporting to be you in an attempt to sabotage your business. Even if you’re not going to use those particular social networks or platforms at the moment, as your business starts to grow you may want to branch out and start marketing with them.

But even if you ultimately don’t, it gives your competition (or any disgruntled customers who want to sow discord and animosity) less of a chance to do so!

Avoid Emotional Responses

This can be the biggest downfall for even the calmest business owner. All it takes is one loud voice to stir up a crowd, and as a business owner who has cultivated their company starting from nothing, you likely have a great deal of emotion — both good times and bad — invested in your company.

For someone to then come around and start slinging accusations and causing a scene, it’s human nature to want to respond to them with emotion. However, your best approach is to reply with honesty and sincerity. If you truly are at fault, apologize and offer to make things right. It may not be to the customers’ liking, but trying to rectify the issue will go a long way toward helping to save your reputation and demonstrate to others that you are genuinely interested in fixing the problem.

Be Open and Transparent

Everyone makes mistakes. And if you’ve made a mistake, large or small, it’s important to be up front and honest with your customers and potential users. Word spreads faster than ever on places like social networks, so in being honest and transparent you show that you’re willing to take responsibility for the problem and work to help make it right.

Set Up Google Alerts

Since no business owner can be everywhere at once, one of the most helpful things you can do to help save and protect your brand reputation is to set up Google alerts. This will alert you whenever someone uses your name or your business name anywhere that is searched and indexed by Google. It’s a great way to find what is being said about your company even in places where you’re not directly part of the conversation.

Work with an On-Demand Team

Finally, if it’s all too much to handle, there’s no shame in reaching out to a dedicated brand reputation team. At Workdom, we’ve helped hundreds of business owners including helping to build or solidify their respective business reputations. Reach out to our experienced professionals today and let us help you safeguard what you’ve worked so hard to build!

What Is MarTech Optimization and How Can It Help You to Grow Your Business?

February 26, 2021 by Workdom Strategist

In the world of marketing technology, it seems like there’s no end to the tools, services, software, and platforms that all somehow play a crucial role in your business. Maybe you’re one of the many businesses that even have several platforms that tend to overlap, especially when it comes to things like search engine optimization and social media marketing.

The downside to having everything at your fingertips and a tool for every conceivable need is that because they overlap, it can get cluttered quickly. Oftentimes in our MarTech optimization audits, we find companies use several platforms to accomplish the tasks that could be done by just a few. Or they use platforms that don’t really serve their needs, but because “it has always been done this way” they tend to stay with what’s familiar and comfortable at the expense of business growth.

There are even those companies who know they need a solid MarTech stack but aren’t sure where to begin or what features are most important.

Stop. Take a deep breath. Relax. Workdom has you covered.

By implementing a proper MarTech optimization strategy, not only will your business be in a better position to scale, but you’ll be able to use the right tools for the right job without getting bogged down in the clutters of thousands upon thousands of marketing technology tools out there.

What Will a MarTech Optimization Strategy Actually Do for My Business?

You may be wondering how proper MarTech optimization can pay off. The answer to that is “in several ways”. First and foremost, it helps you improve your overall marketing efficiency. You’re able to get more done, seamlessly. Properly optimizing your MarTech stack will show you where your biggest sales are coming from, what’s driving them, and how you can squeeze even more ROI out of it.

In short, you’ll be able to put the right people and the right investment behind the efforts that are making you the most money, making MarTech Optimization a smart move that could lead to significant growth for your business.

Putting the Tech Back in MarTech

The next question that naturally follows when it comes to MarTech Optimization is what kind of technology will be optimized. In order for marketers to optimize their marketing, the right technology has to be in place to allow for things like:

Being easy enough to use so that the whole team can get on board and get behind the technology
Integration with existing technology so that all of the moving parts work together seamlessly as a whole
Provide clear and noticeable benefits to the customer experience
Allow for full-spectrum reporting and analysis of information to show where improvements can be made
Customize the process for specific needs
Automate certain processes to help achieve a greater ROI
And much more

That’s a tall order for any single technology to fill, which is why a MarTech stack is never truly, fully optimized.

MarTech Optimization is Not a Once-and-Done Strategy

Even though you can transform your MarTech stack into a well-oiled machine, it’s not the kind of process where you can feel content to rest on your laurels once everything is done. Just like any good marketing strategy, once the heavy lifting is done, all that’s left is to optimize and refine. New marketing tools and platforms are being developed, bought, sold, and merged all the time, and it’s entirely possible that the tool you love today might disappear tomorrow. That’s why it’s so important to have MarTech Optimization done consistently over time so that you stay on top of your marketing tasks before they end up on top of you!

Whether you need help creating a solid strategy or you need a hand with refining your stack and making sure you’re using the technology that really matters to your bottom line, Workdom can help. Our experienced advertising professionals know how to help you reach your marketing strategies while leveraging the best tools and platforms for the job. Consult with us today and let us know more about the stack you’re currently using, and we’ll help you formulate a concrete plan to optimize every stage of your marketing with the best tools for the job and the best software investments to help you get more done.

If it has been awhile since you optimized your MarTech stack, not to worry! We can work with what you have as well as help you better understand what’s available, so that you can put your full marketing efforts behind designing and launching campaigns that work, with the right tools to help you follow-up, measure and analyze them all.

New Year, New B2C Email Marketing Ideas

January 9, 2021 by Workdom Marketing Specialist

It’s a new year, and with that comes the excitement of revitalizing fresh new marketing ideas and initiatives with your target audience. While everyone else is hopping aboard the “new year, new you” train, your business will be reaching out to customers who are eager for change to keep on building up all that momentum you’ve been working on over the holiday season.

Don’t Give Up, Refocus!

E-commerce retailers in particular tend to see a sudden spike of activity right after the holidays and well into the new year — the precise time when you’d think the holiday rush would be over and people would be returning (grudgingly) to the workplace and the routine of life.

And while the transition from 2020 to 2021 was definitely different than in years past, that doesn’t mean you have to throw away all of those efforts you’ve been building upon over the season. Now’s the time that people are eagerly eyeing last minute deals and deep discounts on things that might not have sold over the holidays.

Not only that, but they’ll also be looking for ways to freshen up and refocus on whatever goals they have coming up. Although weight loss is always a popular one, even if you’re not in that niche, it’s worth realizing that this is also a time for renewal, which means renewed effort toward making sure your consumers have the highest quality products, impeccable service and much more.

Remind them of all the things your brand does to help them look, feel or work better, and reconnect with them in such a way that the start of the year doesn’t necessarily mark an entirely new beginning, but rather a rekindling of an already strong relationship.

Challenge the Mundane

As we mentioned, the “new year, new you” has been done to death. So what can you do to challenge that mundane, rehashed cliché and turn it on its head? Maybe your business isn’t about fresh, new and exciting, but instead the tried, true and proven? Make sure you’re able to highlight that in your messages.

Not every new year’s email has to be about what’s new, exciting and what’s next. Your brand voice should always be in charge of shaping your messages instead of banking on what your competitors are doing. What are some ways that you can buck the trend while still staying on brand?

What’s Your Resolution?

Resolutions are another one of those things that comes with the new year territory. And this is the time that many businesses not only thank their customers for a great year, but also let them know about the exciting things that’s about to come and that they should be looking forward to. As a socially-aware and involved business, this is also a great time to showcase what you’ve been working on behind the scenes. You can even delve into showing teasers as it always work to spark interest.

For example, you may be working on a new or updated product or service launch. You may have realized some things could be improved in the way you do business. You may have set some company goals of your own. Letting your customers know about these goals, as well as reinforcing your mission and philosophy, helps you stay true to your brand and your message while making sure that message resonates with your target audience.

Many businesses look at the new year as a reason to “reinvent” their brand, but if you’re happy with your voice and your approach, you don’t have to. What you can do is continue to remind customers and prospects that you’re the same company they’ve come to know, like and trust over the years, and you’ll continue to be so — building upon the credibility and authority that they’ve come to rely on you for.

So share those resolutions and give a human side to your business. It might seem like revealing a vulnerability, but it has amazing effects on the right audience. They’ll be right there along with you, championing your brand, the way that truly loyal customers do.

Need Help Getting Things Moving?

Of course, it’s one thing to share these new marketing ideas, but another thing entirely to implement them. You have to think long and hard about your brand, its perception with your target audience, how you plan to shift or introduce new products or services this year, and of course, how your goals align with all of that.

It can feel overwhelming to try and tackle it all, much less in a month. That’s why Workdom is here to help. Our senior advertising specialists have the knowledge, experience and expertise to help you hone and refine your marketing message so that it attracts the right kind of customers and helps build long lasting relationships with them. Reach out to us today for any help with your brand messaging, as well as other marketing initiatives like email marketing, social media and much more.