Five Ways Smart Event Marketers Are Using 1st Party Data to Reach Attendees Across the Web

According to research in a recent eMarketer article, marketers continue to place the highest value on data which they collect themselves i.e. first-party data, especially transaction history, customer information and behavioral data, vs. second- or third-party data, which is collected by others.

Our exhibition and event clients certainly do as well.  First-party data is the most important data asset in informing the tens of millions of online ads we place for attendee acquisition, exhibitor promotion, content marketing, and sponsor activation for a variety of reasons.

Here are five ways to leverage your first-party data…

(1) By applying your first-party data against undifferentiated ad inventory through real-time bidding (RTB), the automated buying of online ads in real-time through ad exchanges, you can significantly reduce your costs vs. site-specific ad buys thus enabling you to buy more advertising against your potential attendees and/or exhibitors for the same ad spend.

(2) First-party data is a key driver behind online retargeting, which enables you to deliver advertising via RTB ad buys to people across the web that you cookied when they visited your web site. In addition, advanced segmentation of this data enables you to tailor your targeting, messaging and bidding based on visitors’ site activity.

(3) If you are employing content marketing, then your first-party data can be very valuable in distributing your content to your target audiences, especially through native / in-stream ads on the major social nets such as Facebook which allow you to overlay your data on their ad inventory.

(4) Working with relevant data and ad delivery partners, you can match your first-party data against large, third-party data sets to create new lookalike audiences of potential attendees based on users across the web with similar behaviors and/or characteristics to your current audiences, and then target these new audiences which “look like” your current ones through RTB ad buys.

(5) Data onboarding enables you to upload your email or postal mailing lists to a relevant solutions provider, where your first-party data is then matched to their data sets and/or partners’ cookie/audience pools, enabling you to serve display ads to the matched users across the web similar to the way you are able to retarget your web site visitors.

Your first-party data can be a key asset in visitor acquisition and other event promotion but don’t forget that people not data/cookies buy tickets and attend events.

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Posted on August 28, 2015