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9 steps to implement a first-party data strategy

Last updated: September 19, 2024

First-party data gives media companies real insights into what their audience loves, allowing for tailored content and ads. Plus, it helps build stronger, direct connections with viewers, boosts engagement and revenue. But if first-party data’s such a game-changer, why are so many companies struggling to implement a first-party data strategy?

Besides just having the right data, you need close cross-functional collaboration, tight strategic alignment, attention to detail, and the right technology. 

And that’s where a lot of companies stumble, according to Boston Consulting Group research: While nine out of ten marketers say that first-party data is important to their digital marketing programs, less than a third of marketers are consistently effective at accessing and integrating data across channels, and very few are good at using data to create better outcomes for customers.

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At Omeda, we’ve helped 100+ media, publishing and information companies navigate this process. Read on to see how they’re not just managing their first-party data, but using it to connect with and drive long-term value from their audience. 

Define use cases for your first-party data strategy 

When we’re helping clients create a first-party strategy, it’s usually easier to start from their desired end state and work backward from there. 

So start by imagining how you want to improve your audience experience. Get the ball rolling with these questions: 

What kinds of emails, promotions and automated email campaigns do you need in place to create a smooth audience experience? 

For instance, you could be running payment reminder and cart abandonment emails and sending payment recovery emails to subscribers with a failed payment.   

Do you want to institute meters, paywalls or both? 

At Omeda, our publishing clients use their first-party data to run a variety of reg walls and hard and soft paywalls, targeted at different audiences based on the number of previous visits, purchase history and other factors. 

What are your biggest audience growth priorities (increasing website traffic, email sign-ups, cross-branded promotions, etc.)? And what tactics are you using to drive them? 

For instance, Arkansas Business targeted visitors to their legal website with a personalization prompting them to subscribe to their legal newsletter. But they only targeted the personalization to visitors that hadn’t already subscribed. Thanks in part to this approach, the personalization had a 4.3% CTR and a 34.2% conversion rate. 

Other clients recommend articles to website visitors and email recipients based on their individual engagement and purchase history. So far, 18% of website visitors who click an Omeda customer’s Content Recommendation module end up clicking two or more links. 

From there, think about the data points you need to put them in action. That’ll help you answer more specific questions about your first-party data strategy, like: 

What kind of demographic and behavioral data do you want to track? And how will you collect it? 

Think about specific use cases, like payment reminder emails or content recommendations. From there, list out the demographic and behavioral information you’ll need to execute those use cases. 

Say that you have two newsletters — one for small business owners and another for Fortune 500 product leaders. In this case, you’d want to segment your list by “company size” and collect that demographic through all of your marketing channels. Repeat as needed until you’ve fulfilled all of your use cases. 

This will help you prioritize the right data points and use your incoming data more strategically. 

What audience segments do you want to create? 

Revisiting our Arkansas Business example, the team needed to create separate “legal newsletter subscriber” and “non-subscriber” segments to run their personalization effectively. 

What metrics do you need to track? Are you tracking them across all of your channels? (Do you need to?) 

What website metrics do you need to track in order to create the content and implement the paywalls and gates you need? 

Identify and aggregate your first-party data sources

Start by listing every source of audience data within your organization (this ranges from your external-facing channels, like your email and event platform, to your payment tool, your CRM, etc.). 

At Omeda, we have our new publishing clients list all of the magazines and websites in their portfolio, as well as the emails and the types of emails that they’re running. 

Create audience segments using demographics, behaviors and attributes

From there, we have clients list out the demographics and behaviors they’re currently tracking (a demographic would be “business” or “job title” whereas a behavior would be “whitepaper – download”). 

Then for each demographic and behavior, we have them list the specific attributes linked to that data point. These additional labels give you more information about the demographic and behavior you’re tracking – and this is what will help you segment your audience.

Say you’re heading up a financial services publication and tracking data from your educational webinars. Each attendee’s profile would have a behavior called “webinar attendee” to note that they did attend the webinar. That tells us that the person showed up, rather than registering without attending. 

But it doesn’t tell us what the webinar was about, what date it took place, or what knowledge level the attendees had. And if you’re trying to segment your audience beyond superficial characteristics, you really need that information. 

That’s where attributes come in. Staying with our webinar example, some attributes would be “webinar name,” “webinar date,” “webinar status.” 

With those attributes in place, you can start segmenting your webinar audience by more specific categories, like topic, date of last engagement, or number of engagements. 

And that, more than anything, will help you lay the foundation for an audience-first content and revenue strategy.  

Standardize your audience data across sources 

Once you’ve defined your demographics, behaviors, and attributes, ensure they’re uniform across all your data sources. Otherwise, your segments will only include some of the total audience that actually meets that criteria. And you’ll miss costly opportunities to engage your audience and drive revenue through your first-party data strategy.

Prevention is your best defense here, so meet with your organization’s data owners to agree on common data labeling, collection, maintenance and privacy practices. 

Unify your first-party data

By now, you’ve probably realized that you have billions of data points siloed across an ever-growing number of solutions (read: that email platform you tried for six months before switching). Your event manager might be formatting data one way while ad sales uses another convention. You might have someone’s audience data split between three different records. 

Data silos don’t just create busy work or complicate your reporting. They distort your view of your audience and keep you from giving them the resources, offers and content they need. 

So if you’re serious about your first-party data strategy, consider using a CDP specifically for media.

These tools take in first-party data from every channel, standardize it, and store it in one easily accessible place. Audience profiles update in real time as new information comes in — and they’re added to segments as they meet the underlying criteria.  

This gives your team the most current, complete view of your audience. In one query, everyone from your writers to your email team and support staff can see how someone engages with you across every channel. 

The end result: Your team can spend less time trying to figure out what works — and more time putting it in motion.

Apply identity resolution everywhere 

So you’re getting all your data into the same place. Great. But what if someone — let’s call him Mark — has already engaged with your brands through your email, website, and ads? If all their data flows into your database, you will get three different records for that one person. 

What’s the problem? After all, your email team knows how Mark interacts with your emails, your website team knows what Mark needs, and your ad team can see what he clicked, so everyone knows how to serve him, right? But nobody can see how Mark’s engaged with your brand as a whole. 

So they’re missing opportunities to create better content that incorporates all of his interests, needs and behaviors, not just what happens to surface on an email or a website. 

Worse, when someone’s profile is spread across multiple records, they won’t surface in segments they should qualify for. 

That’s especially true if you’re targeting based on the number of engagements, specific behavioral or interest-based segments or creating a lead scoring model. 

Put it in practice 

Say that you’re running a new subscription acquisition campaign. You know that people who engage on multiple channels are more likely to pay for a subscription than single-channel users, so you target that group in your campaign. 

To find that audience in your database, you might search for people with “3+ total engagements” and “interacted across email AND website.” 

But if you haven’t merged your audience’s email data with their website data, nobody will come up in that search. So you’ll have to manually scroll your database for repeat names, or just assume nobody has visited both your email and website. 

Either way, good luck getting that subscription acquisition campaign done in time to drive sales. 

The solution: As you unify your data, make sure that you’ve set up identity resolution workflows to identify records that come from the same person and merge them into one profile. 

Sound tedious? Want to assign this to your intern and never think about it again? We can’t blame you. 

That’s why Omeda’s audience data platform has a built-in identity resolution tool. We run through your database for records that have a 95% likelihood of coming from the same person, then surface all the relevant records for your review. 

From there, you can choose whether to merge the records into one profile or not. This way, you can prevent data quality issues before they start — and ensure you’re always targeting based on the most complete, current information. 

Develop value-first first-party data collection mechanisms 

Time for a pulse check. You’ve determined what first-party data you need to please and drive revenue from your audience. You’ve developed a streamlined way to get that data in one place. And you’ve started creating workflows to ensure it’s complete, clean, and clear of duplicates when it enters your system of record. 

With those systems in place, you can focus on really building up your audience profiles. 

But consumers are (rightfully) becoming more protective of their personal information. Research from Capterra shows that 86% of digital consumers feel forced into providing personal information to access website content at least some of the time. Worse, 72% of respondents said they sometimes provide fake personal information to access website content. 

So besides making a bad first impression, you’re getting bad information that incentivizes you to make the wrong decisions. 

How can you get the information you need to put your audience first? Tell your audience how they’ll benefit from sharing their information: 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience, according to Accenture research. 

Start by telling your readers exactly how you’ll use their information to improve their experience, whether it’s by sending them more targeted offers or tailoring content to their job title or industry. Then collect their data with the following tactics: 

• Incorporate consent forms into your user experience 
• Manage consent to all platforms from the same place 
• Mix and match required fields between forms so you’re getting more information about your audience without making each one too long or invasive. 
• Maximize submissions (and make your audience happy!) by incorporating proprietary research and original expert insight in your gated content
• Gamify data collection by incorporating quizzes, polls and surveys into your mix 

Protect your first-party data with thorough data governance and privacy practices 

You’ve put a lot of time and energy into building your first-party data strategy. But none of these efforts will pay off if you can’t keep your audience data safe (or comply with local, national and international data privacy laws). 

Keep these questions in mind as you design your first-party data strategy: 

What data privacy regulations do you need to follow in each of your audience’s state, country and continents? What kind of consent language, opt-out mechanisms and disclaimers do you need to include on your forms and contracts? 

Pay close attention to each individual law, as specific protections differ between states (for instance, Oregon protects “sensitive information” related to sexual orientation, nonbinary or transgender status, and status as a victim of a crime, whereas other states’ laws have a more limited scope).

From there, create a process for processing and honoring your audience member’s opt-outs. Not only do you need to confirm that you’re following all of the data privacy laws in that person’s location, but you need to ensure the opt-out is applied across every channel.

Otherwise, you might stop collecting website tracking information from someone, but accidentally send them emails. Even if it’s an honest mistake, it just looks spammy. 

This is where using a CDP really comes in handy. Since they store audience data from every channel, you can easily segment your audience by location and/or opt-in status, or apply a change or deletion request to someone’s entire profile. 

How will you obtain informed consent from users? 

If you’re really putting your audience first, you can’t settle for following the law. You need to use data privacy as an opportunity to build trust and provide value to your audience.

On your forms, tell your audience how you’ll collect, use, and store their data, and give them clear opt-in and opt-out mechanisms.

Also perform a content audit to make sure your current registration, content download, and newsletter sign-ups forms include this language.

Do you have robust security measures in place to protect user data? 

For peace of mind, consider using a customer data platform with a dedicated privacy and data governance team. At Omeda, our privacy and data governance team ensures that our platform is keeping audience data safe and educates our clients on privacy best practices. 

Test, measure and iterate your first-party data strategy 

Start by defining key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with your goals to track progress and demonstrate the value of your first-party data.

Then once you’ve implemented your first-party data strategy, continuously test and monitor it using your CDP, email reports, website analytics and other tools.  

The most important KPIs for you will depend on your organization and revenue model. But generally speaking, if the percentage of your known audience is growing over time, and you’re recording behaviors related to those known audience members, you’re in good shape. (At Omeda, we track this as “Known+Behaviors.”)

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