First-party data can be a powerful tool for sales and marketing programs. The key is to first understand the various types of data that can be selected then select and isolate the ones that are most important to act on. Most marketers have a wealth of data at their fingertips by setting out with a plan before a marketing program is set into action about how to respond to select first-party data signals is a powerful way to be able to have a more audience-centric marketing strategy and clear the path for more personalized efforts in the future.
First-party Data Is The Key To A Marketer's Success.
With companies more focused on understanding first-party data, the next step is to make sure that marketing programs are set up to effectively listen for these signals. Every marketing tactic, from webinars to whitepapers to interactive tools, have the opportunity to capture this data. What is important is the methodology and rigor behind thinking about two components of these tactics, engagement and CTAs. Furthermore, these two techniques are often confused and used in replace of one another. But treating them separately will yield greater insight into audience behavior.
Engagement & Calls to Action (CTAs)
The summary of engagement is how you expect your audience to behave and engage with you during a marketing tactic. This is how as a marketer you will retain an audience member’s attention during an experience. More engagement equals more first-party data that can be leveraged to personalize future programs for those buyers. These would be techniques that include polling, Q&A and conversational bots.
CTAs are a slight variation on engagement, whereby this is the action you’re looking to engage your audience in at the end of an experience. These are sometimes the only engagement techniques that marketers consider using at the end of the event since the data gathered can be the most straightforward to act on. CTA techniques include book a meeting, speak to sales or enroll in a trial.
Leverage An Audience-Centric Approach
Marketing Content
Messaging content
Delivery Mechanism
Route to engage audiences
Engagement
Interactive elements to retain attendee’s attention
Key CTAs
Actions for attendees to take during and after the event
Buying Signals
The results of engagement and CTAs
Structured Data
With an understanding of the role that Engagement and CTAs play in the digital mix, marketers can orchestrate experiences that have separate and distinct actions for each of them. Further, they can evaluate separately what audience reactions were to each of them.
This will allow clear courses of action to be able to act on specific data from the experiences. Isolating cohorts of people who respond to a specific engagement technique or CTA allows for specific sales or marketing plays to be used for groups that demonstrate specific behaviors.
Polling can provide powerful insight into the stage of a buyer’s journey or even insight about a prospect’s level of maturity. For example, asking the audience how they compare to an industry-published data point is a great way to gather insight. In the example below, as part of the content on a virtual event, data was shared around industry average employee retention.
Following that, it is natural to engage the audience with how they stand in relation to this and based on someone’s response they can be treated differently. So out of this polling we have three cohorts of respondents that we can treat very differently from a sales and marketing perspective.
- For audience members that say they are doing about industry average, messaging can be used that focuses on taking their programming to the next level or how to move to an advanced stage.
- For audience members reporting that they are already doing better than average, it would be a signal to invite them to be a guest on an upcoming panel webinar or even to submit their great work for an awards program that your company may be hosting.
- For audience members that say they are below industry average, messaging can be much more empathetic and discuss what barriers they may have and how they could receive support to get their programming to industry average.
Polling to Influence Program Placement
How does your employee retention rate look in comparison to the Best Practices data?
Just about the same
Sales: SDR follow up to talk about advanced capabilities to take employee retention to next level
Better
Marketing: Events Email Campaign for Future Panelists: Tell us what you’re doing well
Worse
Sales: Personal email with content recommendation that will help alleviate those challenges with CTA to schedule more time
Conclusion
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