When it comes to data monetization, two realities define the business landscape facing a new data provider: the overwhelming amount of data flooding the market and the number of players in the market. In such an environment, advertisers are looking for offerings with a clear benefit from trusted providers. That means your data sets not only need to be unique, but also demonstrate an obvious value proposition.
Here are three ways to package and differentiate your data for data monetization:
1) Think audience, think scale
Begin by focusing on the data needs of advertisers and their agencies. Consider the scale necessary for your data sets to be most relevant to advertisers and the audience they reach. Moreover, think about creating products around these audiences that will support brand preference and value. After all, advertisers and agencies are looking to you and your products to support their campaign directives.
To market your data for data monetization and deliver against advertisers’ needs, you should have two core competencies—understanding how to use data digitally and how to create a compelling value proposition.
“It’s important to ask yourself what specific problems you’re trying to help a marketer solve and how you are differentiating yourself from other data providers already in the market,” says Brandon Zirkle, Vice President of Partnerships at PushSpring, a data provider focused on mobile.
2) Segment, segment, segment
Having data—being a company with proprietary data assets—isn’t enough; you have to create products by building a taxonomy for your data that will enable your customers to identify the segments and audiences relevant to their specific campaigns and initiatives. If you have offline data, you will need to connect all you know to the online identities of your customers and prospects in a highly segmented way. Identity resolution offers you the ability to do this, and at scale.
“Let’s say a data provider has a strong core set of automotive data,” said Doug MacDonald, SVP of Digital Solutions at V12 Data, a people-based audience provider. “Augmenting that data with real-time shopping behaviors and other indicators of purchase intent would be of huge interest to marketers, as it would enable brands to get much closer to the sale.”
By providing intersecting data points, you’ll have solved a problem for your prospects: they only have to purchase one data set instead of two or more.
3) Be customer-driven
To create successful data monetization opportunities, data providers should be as focused on the needs of advertisers as brands are on their clients and end customers. They need to offer solutions to common problems, not products that require customers to figure out how to use them.
For PushSpring, this meant focusing on customization.
“Marketers we talked to really wanted the ability to customize their own segments at a very granular level,” PushSpring’s Zirkle said. “And they wanted to be able to visualize a particular customized segment. Custom segments enabled them to meet the audience goals of their campaigns, and visualization enabled them to tell a story to their clients.”
The power of a story transcends the customer. It is the thread that connects your data and your brand to the entire marketing value chain. You must empower your clients to tell a story around a particular set of data—a targeting segment, an audience group—so they can explain why it will work for an advertising campaign.
It’s not easy getting started with data monetization, but we’re here to help. Check out our guide to data monetization.