Somehow, businesses haven’t fully bought on to potential goldmine that is third party data. While most businesses recognize that data is the new currency, most organizations rely on data they collect (first party data) to drive their business decisions.
What does this mean?
This means that although organizations recognize that data driven decisions are important, they are mostly using data they collect themselves. This tells them a lot about what they are doing, but not about what’s going on outside. Third party data is how you get data from other sources, and it can tell you a lot about the outside environment.
For example, a business may partner with a credit bureau like Experian to collect demographic and income levels of different areas, which can be useful for advertising and promotion. You can collect data on everything from demographics to browsing history to transaction history. That data then is collected and packaged and can be purchased by you, the user, to help make decisions.
Sounds awesome right?
Well, it seems that despite how powerful data is, some companies aren’t sold on its value.
#whutthedata?
Pitney Bowes commissioned a study that was conducted by Forrester Consulting and based on those 800 participants they noted the following observations about why companies aren’t using third party data.
Primarily there is some hesitancy to using third party data – business are concerned about accuracy, the fact that data isn’t’ always current, and being able to identify how data changes (i.e what’s the trend).
Data is also difficult to acquire with reliable data coming from expensive data sets, open data sets being less reliable, and issues finding the right data products.
Ultimately, data providers are burdened with helping make third party data more attractive, and they can do so by maintaining the quality of data as it changes in the fast changing world, it can improve the quality and accuracy of data (by expanding the collection strategy, the type of data, and the accuracy of that data), and expand the ways they source data from other third parties. This will help make the case for those who haven’t caught on that third party data is a powerful tool.
Simple truth: Data not only makes the world go around, it can help keep your business afloat. Utilizing first and third party data can help jumpstart your efforts.
Kam has a Master's degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and is an HR professional. Obsessed with food, but writing about virtually anything, he has a passion for LGBT issues, business, technology, and cats.
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