Recap: Take the Trust Fall with First-Party Data

Sago recently held a live webinar to share on all things related to first-party data: its value to brands in relation to third-party data, how to collect and leverage it, and why its future is so bright.

This webinar was hosted by Rebecca Ackerman from the American Marketing Association, and presented by:

Isaac Rogers – President at Sago
Ellie Ahmadi – Chief Marketing Officer at Sago

In this Article:

Why are we talking about first-party data?
A sea of change in market research
What does traditional market research look like at Sago?
The shifting data landscape
What are you doing to prepare for a cookie-less world?
Leveraging market research
Outdated notions of market research
Considering a custom market research approach
6 benefits of first-party market research data
Market research & brand experience
The importance of the full picture in the coming years
Audience Q&A

Why are we talking about first-party data?

Google’s plan to phase out “risky” third-party cookies in 2023 could signal the beginning of the end of third-party data’s reign as king. In this new era, brands will have to get creative and go back to their roots when it comes to gathering intel on their existing and prospective customers. In this webinar, Isaac and Ellie take turns explaining why that may not be such a bad thing.

A sea of change in market research

Here’s an abridged version of Isaac’s opening remarks:

“We’ve seen a huge shift in the past 12 to 18 months…and a lot of it ties to concerns about how marketers are going to be able to make business decisions related to their campaigns—related to how they think about their customer audiences and segments—because a lot of their third-party data sources are either getting cut off, questioned, or just thought about differently. And so now that thinking is kind of having to shift and market research is actually where a lot of those conversations are now turning back to.”

Since not everyone on the call has necessarily had experience working with a traditional market research agency, Isaac took the time to clarify what that looks like.

What does traditional market research look like at Sago?

At Sago, we do 3 things:

1. We get you a custom audience you can talk to and engage with and listen to; people who can answer questions about your marketing decisions, your advertising, how you need to speak and behave with them and in front of them.
2. We have ways for you to get answers. So these are platforms and venues and places where you can talk to that audience.
3. We have experts—people who can help you engage with your audience and provide you with tactics and methods and direction on the best ways to learn from your audience.

“And we do these three things over and over again in a lot of different ways. We do everything from a traditional survey methodology to custom qualitative work, and we have DIY platforms. So these three buckets take on different shapes and sizes. But at the end of the day, it’s the audience, it’s the answers, and it’s the experts that we’re able to bring to the table.”

The shifting data landscape

At this point, Ellie took over to speak more on how the data landscape is shifting. Here are the key stats she highlighted:

• 33 percent of users have terminated relationships with companies over data (Cisco)
• 25 percent of users believe companies are responsible with their personal data (Pew Research Center)
• 15 percent of consumers believe companies use their personal data to improve their lives (Pew Research Center)

And what does this mean for marketers?

• 81 percent of companies still have complete or substantial dependence on third-party data (Twilio)
• 94 percent of marketers agree privacy should be a significant factor in the design of any marketing measurement strategy (Econsultancy)
• 56 percent of marketers believe their organization offers a clear value exchange in return for customers sharing their data (Econsultancy)

Ellie then asked those on the call what was probably the most burning question for today’s topic:

What are you doing to prepare for a cookie-less world?

“There’s a missing piece of the puzzle…understanding what our clients are saying. How do you build that trust? How do I directly hear from my customers? If your customers know that you’re directly talking to them, if they know that you’re acting on their feedback, that’s how you start to build that trust.”

Ellie’s main takeaway here is that if third-party data collection presented trust issues with consumers, then perhaps a return to first-party data could be a way to regain that trust.

But beyond trust-building, the market research processes through which we collect first-party data—as well as the data itself—can amplify and create a more complete picture of our market. Essentially, it fills in the gaps third-party data leaves open.

Isaac on leveraging market research:

“We need to get creative to understand our customers. Marketers are starting to tell us that they’re not sure they’re really getting the full picture of their customers through third-party data.”

Isaac went on to talk about how marketers know plenty about their existing audience from what their third-party data resources tell them. But what about the audience you don’t even know is out there? The audience that doesn’t even know your product our brand exists, or that it could be a solution to their problem? How do you tap into that audience?

“Well, there’s no way to get intent data; there’s no way to get that targeting data if people don’t even know the problem exists for them. So how do we learn the things that I can’t learn from these third-party data sets? How do I understand the unmet needs of a customer? How do I understand what customers are looking for when they don’t even know how to tell me, or when search data doesn’t tell me what I’m looking for? And we’re sitting here going, Hey, remember market research? We’re the folks who can help fill those gaps.”

Outdated notions of market research:

Isaac went on to challenge some of the older perceptions some marketers may have when it comes to traditional market research, namely:

• It’s too expensive
• It’s too slow
• It’s too complicated

“What you need to understand is there’s been a huge evolution in market research over the past five to 10 years. We can move so much faster now. There are so many DIY solutions. There are so many Do-It-For-Me solutions where you can partner with different firms and organizations and conduct very lean research for ad testing, concept testing, segmentation, persona development, and it doesn’t have to be a six-month, $600,000 project anymore. Your project can be tactical, agile, iterative, learning-focused, and it fits right into the marketer’s toolkit.”

Isaac’s main takeaway here is that market research is much bigger than the third-party data marketers may be relying on today. It gives a more complete picture of your customer. Not only does market research give you more insight into the audience that isn’t showing up at your doorstep, but it’s also a much simpler, faster, and more cost-effective process than what it used to be.

“Anyone who tries to tell you that market research is complicated, I would actually shy away from them. Because at the end of the day we’re really just trying to do two or three different things.”

Questions to ask yourself when considering a custom market research approach:

Who am I trying to reach?

“We have an extraordinary capacity to reach an audience that you may not even assume we could reach,” said Isaac. “We have millions of people who are literally taking surveys every single day that we can put your questions in front of, put your copy in front of, put your creative in front of, and get better decisions made faster than ever before.”

What attributes am I looking for?

“There’s a wide range of online solutions these days that could fill pretty much any needs you have. The beauty of these iterative tools we have in research is you can pretty much discover any attribute you might be looking for from an audience.”

What question am I looking to answer?

“It used to be, when you’d think about market research, you’d think of these big huge long discussion guides, these big huge long research frames that were about 15 or 20 questions all embedded into one. But today the research world has become more iterative, more agile. We have a lot of clients today who are just looking for one thing…they just want to know this one thing about their audience.”

6 Benefits of first-party market research data

Isaac emphasized that custom market research campaigns enable brands to learn things about their customers that could fundamentally reshape their marketing plan, and shift go-to-market strategies. Here are the advantages of first-party market research data according to Isaac:

1. Deeper behavioral insights: “There’s a lot of stuff that you just can’t get from your digital footprints, your funnel and flow. There are a lot of conversations that people have that are not included in those data sets, as well as the fact that people are generating data on multiple devices. With market research, we can tie all the fragmented data together. You could spend 30 minutes getting a glimpse into a day in the life of someone to really understand how they go about looking for new products and services.”
2. Persona creation: “You may have good personas created that are based on the patterns and behaviors of the people showing up at your doorstep, but that’s a very small sliver of understanding of who those people are. Market research tells a broader story about who these people are. There are psychographic things about these buyers that you’re totally missing with your advertising. They may look like they’re coming via the same steps in the funnel but there are actually attributes that got them there that are psychographically different. And so with this deeper understanding of your customer that can come from actually just talking and interacting with them through market research, you can create richer personas. You can put voices to these people.”
3. Customer-focused opportunities: “When we’re having these more robust conversations with our customers, we’re not just relying on the data stream and their digital footprint, but we’re actually engaging with them. Customers will tell us all sorts of things about our product. We want to find the opportunities with the people who don’t make it through the product flow because you’re missing just this one thing. Their feedback never hits your data stream if you don’t capture the voice of the customer directly because they’re never going to buy from you. You’re never going to get that intelligence.”
4. Valuable input: “Something that I think people devalue or don’t think about is that these customers, especially in a B2B setting, are super engaged in giving their input. They want the products to be better even if they’re not a current customer. They want to share their opinions and give you their feedback. And even if it doesn’t help you on the marketing side, it could help you on product development or it can help your testing group.”
5. Data validation: “We do a lot of data appending or data aggregation of first-party data assets where we will do some kind of primary research. We’ll do first-party data collection. Maybe we’ll run a survey. Maybe it’s a concept test. Or we’ll pull from part of our database where we can also cross-match those individuals with individuals who you have first-party data access to. We can connect those pieces together so we can say, Here’s what concept they liked and didn’t like and here’s who they actually are in your CRM.”
6. Recontact: “With a smaller cluster of consumer respondents, you can constantly go back to them to test creative ideas, to show them new product ideas, to get them involved in the marketing decision-making process. These micro-communities can be a really cost-effective way for you to continuously engage an audience, and do iterative testing with the same population of people.”

Market research & brand experience

Ellie jumped in here to share her thoughts on the complex riddle of brand perception and brand awareness that third-party data is generally unable to solve. Third-party data is good at figuring out click-through conversion and engagement, and understanding the customer when they actually make a purchase, but what about the all-important question:

What do people actually think of us?

This was exactly the brand-perception question Sago has been trying to answer with its own clients in recent years, particularly from the folks who were clients of its competitors—the portion of the audience that was not showing up in its CRM.

Ellie explains further:

“We ran a qualitative benchmark survey in partnership with market researchers who went out and sat with certain folks and asked these questions in person: Who do you think Sago is? What are they like? What do you think they do?”

This was a fruitful exercise but what was important was to continue running it. Two years later, then six months later, and so on.

“This gave us a new benchmark. And we need to keep on doing this. To challenge ourselves to change our perception, to move the needle to where we want it to be. It became crucial for our own brand awareness to run these types of research campaigns, to step outside of our own first-party data and find out what may not be sitting in our systems,” Ellie continued.

She used these points to segue into an important takeaway:

“If your customers truly believe that you use their data to help improve their lives, if they see those changes you make to your products based on their feedback, you’ll establish that brand loyalty and trust because they’re seeing it.”

Through this, we can see that a campaign to generate brand awareness can actually lead to brand loyalty.

Other key takeaways:

Marketers must find creative ways to understand their customers in order to remain competitive.
First-party data collected through market research provides deeper, more reliable insights.
Market research becomes part of the brand experience and can build loyalty and trust.

The importance of the full picture in the coming years

Isaac made a great point: When the economy is booming, it may not be as important to get everything perfect. But when the economy recedes, your advertising and marketing decisions need to be spot on. Getting the full picture becomes imperative. He explained:

“That’s how you’ll retain your customer share in the next two to four years. That’s how you’re going to grow your market share. It’s going to be a lot more competitive and every dime you spend needs to be on the money. There’s no better way to calibrate your compass than getting to that voice of the customer, and market research is probably the fastest and most effective way to do that.”

Audience Q&A

After Isaac’s closing remarks, Rebecca took over to moderate a lively Q&A session:

What’s the one thing marketers could start on tomorrow as far as market research?

Isaac: “Spend a little bit of time, just a bit of casual Google searching, looking at what your options are from a DIY and self-service perspective. You’ll be amazed at what’s out there. Otherwise, just talking to people like myself and Ellie who are in the industry. We can give you best practices on how to pick an agency or do it DIY style.”

Ellie: “Take it a level back and think about what am I trying to answer that I don’t know the answer to or that doesn’t exist in the data that I have? Is it worth investing in that further? Will the answer to that question make an impact? Start with that question.”

What are some tools you recommend we use to collect first-party data?

Isaac: “The two paths in market research are qualitative research and quantitative research. So depending on what your question is, you typically start down one of those two paths and there are DIY solutions, there are full-service solutions, there are self-service solutions that cover that full spectrum, depending on your budget and how robust your question is.”

What were some of the brand health metrics you were tracking with the Sago research campaign you conducted?

Ellie: “It was awareness…aided awareness versus unaided awareness. And also how we stood against our competitors. And then who do they think we are and what is it they think we do as an organization?”

If I’m a marketer without research experience, do I have to rely on outside agencies for this first-party data?

Isaac: “It depends. Look at the size of the prize. If you’re trying to make a giant shift in the tone and voice of your brand, I would very much recommend hiring a bona fide research agency or an independent consultant. It doesn’t have to be wildly expensive. But bring in somebody whose job it is to do these things who can help you navigate these questions. But if it’s a simple product extension and you just want to scratch the itch to know like, well, maybe this other category customer would be interested in this if we marketed to them. That’s something I would encourage you to just get 20 customers on some video interviews, and go ask them yourself. It’s better to talk to your customers than guess about them.”

Ellie: “With the evolution of marketing over the past 15 to 20 years, all marketing people have become market researchers in a way, right? We’re constantly overwhelmed by the data that comes at us and we’re trying to understand the story, to connect the dots of that story to come back with an analysis, an ‘aha’ moment. So we’re all market researchers. Don’t sell yourselves short.”

What is one of your favorite wins and what measurements stand out from that example?

Here, Isaac shared a great story about a past client of his: a big gum manufacturer who was trying to target an affluent, all-male, athletic, single or recently married, super trendy segment for their product. They had created a video ad campaign and were testing the videos on subjects from this target audience. At one point, they wanted to dismiss one of the subjects because he just didn’t align with their perception of an ideal customer—he wasn’t trendy, or affluent, or articulate. But when Isaac took a closer look at the subject, he realized this participant was buying more of the client’s product than anyone else in the respondent group. That was a big moment for the gum manufacturer because they realized that they had to change their preconceived notions of who their customers actually were. Sometimes the way we market our products may be attracting people we never anticipated to be our perfect customer.

How do you see AI impacting market research this decade?

Ellie: “I think there’s still a lot to be explored but I think at the end of the day you need a human involved in that AI process to optimize it, to make sure that it’s delivering. AI is great and I think it will have a place in market research, but I think it still requires a lot of human involvement for a long time to come.”

Isaac: “They’re helper applications, is the way I would put it. AI at this point in time is really good at looking for patterns. But what AI is not good at is looking for nuance. And what market research is so good at illuminating is the nuances of how to say this a little bit differently to this particular audience, or the thing you’re not saying that you should be saying. AI is not good at that, but it can be helpful for categorizing, or what we call theme extraction, or identifying patterns. We’re a few years removed still from AI showing up like the Terminator and killing all the researchers. The nuance is where the nuggets are, and AI usually glances over those and calls them noise because it’s looking for that strong signal, not to find meaning in the noise.”

What about first-party data that already exists in your systems?

Ellie: “You should be tapping into it. You should be staying connected there. But again, what we’ve been talking about is in terms of the unknown—the stuff you don’t know yet because it’s not sitting there in your system. So sometimes you need to go out there and get more of that. So it goes back to the question: Are you trying to understand something that’s not within the data that’s in your database? Or are you trying to convert additional people that are not sitting in your database? Those can become like two different tactics in market research.”

Isaac: “Yeah, you’ve got first-party data for your existing customers. But you know almost nothing about the customers who choose to buy from your competitors. And so that’s where market research can be super helpful. In some cases, first-party data can become like tell me what you already know. I mentioned earlier that doing things like data appends can be amazingly powerful these days. Because if you do have CRM data about your products and services, we can match and marry that with either the segment or the actual individual you bring into research. And that’s like a chef’s kiss.”

In terms of getting ready for the cookie-less future, B2C companies have built systems of first-party data, but B2B companies are not in that same position. What are some effective ways for B2B marketers to build first-party data?

Isaac: “You know, it’s funny, I would expect that question to go in the other direction. What we oftentimes see is that B2B companies have fairly robust CRM solutions, apart from maybe those, like CPG companies, who are not selling directly to their customers. So companies who don’t have that direct access to first-party data, who don’t have that direct customer relationship, end up being bigger consumers of research. That makes us like the bridge to help you understand the people you don’t have a direct connection to.”

Ellie: “For B2B, it’s tough to build that audience because you’re not dealing with a shopping cart model, you’re not dealing with a buying community. That’s why it gives rise to this whole ABM and intent data. And I think that those are great options for building first-party data. Beyond that, you need to get creative with how you find and connect with your audience.”

Wrapping up the webinar

The experts have spoken and the message is clear:

• Regardless of the future of third-party data, first-party data needs to be in every marketer’s toolkit in order to get the complete customer picture.
• Market research has evolved to the point of being a perfectly agile, cost-effective, and a non-complex means to collect and leverage first-party data.
• There is a full spectrum of market research models out there—everything from DIY and do-it-for-me to self-service and full-service—depending on how robust your question is and how influential it may be in reshaping your product or marketing strategy.
• Perhaps the greatest value of market research is how it can strengthen brand awareness and, by extension, brand loyalty.
• You don’t know what you don’t know, but there are many ways to find out.

If you enjoyed our latest webinar on first-party data and would like to learn more about how market research can give your brand an edge during a recession, Sago can help you navigate the process. Don’t hesitate to reach out!