In the marketing world, a campaign's success depends on the quality and depth of data used to inform strategies. In-house teams hold the keys to valuable first-party data like customer insights, behavioral patterns and operational intelligence that external marketing agencies need to create more targeted, relevant and impactful campaigns.
Sometimes, though, it isn’t that easy for marketers to provide that data to their agency partners. Many marketers surveyed pointed to a bottle neck with IT. In fact, 71% of marketers surveyed admitted their relationship with IT teams is “not collaborative.”
If IT bottlenecks prevent timely access to customer insights, agencies may miss opportunities to optimize active campaigns, leading to higher costs and missed revenue. In order to overcome this challenge, marketers and agencies will need to collaborate and build bridges to these other technical teams to find success.
The value of first-party data in marketing
First-party data (and to a similar extent, zero-party data) is incredibly valuable for any organization. It is composed of performance figures for properties owned by the business. Think: website analytics, sales data, customer feedback and more.
First-party data offers clearer insights into business performance than third-party data from external platforms like Google Ads or TikTok, making it invaluable to marketing teams.
Unlike third-party data, which is often aggregated from various platforms and lacks direct ties to business outcomes, first-party data is directly tied to customer behaviors, offering a more accurate picture of performance. When marketers can share this data with their agencies, it can unlock new levels of success by improving targeting precision, enhancing personalization efforts, optimizing performance and reducing waste in spend.
Let’s look at one example. A digital agency may be handling the online spend for a sneaker retailer. With standard third-party data, the agency can see things like conversion rates, overall budget spend and other high-level metrics. What they may be missing though, is that there is a disconnect between the ad creative and the messaging on a product page causing customers to abandon items in their carts.
Without access to first-party data, the agency might continue spending money on the campaign until their client advises them that something isn’t working. But if they had real-time access to that data, the agency would likely identify the issue and adjust course quickly.
Industry-specific data regulations
Despite a marketing team’s best intentions, their hands may sometimes be tied. Some industries, such as healthcare, finance and insurance, operate under strict data privacy regulations that limit how business and customer data can be shared, stored and processed.
Regulatory frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) impose stringent controls on how businesses manage personal data. These regulations introduce additional challenges for in-house teams.
For instance, in the healthcare industry, data related to patient interactions, diagnoses and treatments is protected under HIPAA. This means that any marketing initiatives must comply with regulations around personal health information. Similarly, financial institutions must handle personally identifiable information with great care to avoid violations of GDPR or CCPA.
In these highly regulated industries, sharing data with marketing agencies is not as straightforward as it may be in less-restricted sectors. These strict regulatory frameworks limit what data can be shared, making cross-functional alignment between marketing, IT and legal teams essential for ensuring compliance while driving impactful marketing strategies.
Building bridges to stronger relationships
Rather than seeing this as a problem, agencies can use it as an opportunity to strengthen relationships across their client’s business. The trick is to identify how each of these teams can contribute to the relationship.
The role of IT
IT departments play a pivotal role in secure data sharing while ensuring privacy protocols are followed. Their team is responsible for setting up data-sharing infrastructures that maintain data integrity, protecting against breaches and complying with industry regulations.
Some of the critical ways IT departments contribute to data-sharing initiatives include:
- Data encryption: Ensure that data shared with agencies is encrypted both at rest and in transit. Encryption protects sensitive information from unauthorized access during the exchange process.
- Access control: Set up role-based access controls to restrict who within the marketing agency has access to certain types of data. This is especially important in industries like finance and healthcare, where only specific personnel should view sensitive data.
- Data anonymization: In cases where customer data is highly sensitive, IT can help anonymize datasets before sharing them with agencies. Anonymization strips away personally identifiable information while retaining the insights needed for effective marketing.
- Monitoring and auditing: Implement monitoring and auditing protocols to track how data is being used by third-party agencies. These measures ensure that data is not being misused or mishandled.
The role of the legal team
Legal departments are essential partners when sharing first-party data with marketing agencies, particularly in highly regulated industries. Legal teams ensure that data-sharing practices comply with the latest regulations, contracts are in place to govern data use and liability is managed appropriately.
Key responsibilities of the legal team include:
- Drafting data-sharing agreements: Legal teams draft contracts and data-sharing agreements that define the rules of the road for data access, use and handling by third parties. These contracts typically include clauses around data protection, confidentiality and compliance with relevant laws.
- Managing consent and regulatory requirements: Ensure that data-sharing practices comply with consent and opt-in requirements as dictated by GDPR, CCPA and other privacy laws. In some cases, For instance, the legal team may require explicit customer consent before their data can be used in marketing campaigns.
- Managing data breach protocols: Things can go wrong. In the event of a data breach, legal teams coordinate the necessary steps to manage liability, report the breach to regulatory authorities and inform affected customers.
Business intelligence’s role
The business intelligence (BI) team is responsible for aggregating, analyzing and translating raw data into actionable insights that can fuel business decisions across the board. These insights can also kick the efforts of a marketing team into high gear, making BI a critical partner in any data sharing relationship.
Their responsibilities include:
- Data aggregation and cleansing: Pull and aggregate data from various sources, including customer interactions, sales transactions, website analytics, CRM systems and more. Then, ensure all data is cleaned and ready for analysis by multiple teams.
- Insight generation: Actionable insights are the guide to great marketing strategies. BI teams might identify high-value customer segments, predict purchasing trends or highlight areas where customers are likely to churn. These insights can then be shared with agencies to inform more effective targeting and messaging.
The combined knowhow of the marketing, IT, legal, BI and agency teams can be an incredibly powerful force – even in highly regulated industries. This cross-functional relationship helps to guide strong strategies that can have a deep and sustained impact on a business’ marketing efforts.
But it’s not enough to simply aim for collaboration. There are a few best practices that in-house teams should follow when giving access to sensitive data to agencies.
Best practices for sharing data with agencies
It all starts with a shared vision and clear objectives. This is true for both in-house teams and agencies.
Marketers should clearly define their goals, while agencies should request the necessary data and access to deliver optimal results. During a recent interview, Funnel partner Springbok Agency indicated this starts at the pitch phase.
“First, we take a step back,” said Kevin Gloudemans, team manager for paid at Springbok Agency. “When we go to pitch, we are already taking the first onboarding steps. We select the client team according to the stated goals and which profiles will match best with the client.”
Read all of Kevin's onboarding tips here.
With shared objectives in place, it’s time to dig into the data that is actually needed. In many instances, less can be more. In other words, marketers should focus on providing the highest quality data rather than providing every data point they possibly can.
Just think, while AI-powered tools can automate tons of processes, a human being must still interpret the insights served up to build a strategy. If there is too much data (and quality is too poor), the analysis can be time consuming and inaccurate.
To help ease this pressure, marketers and agencies should agree on a shared set of tools that can facilitate ongoing collaboration and data sharing in ways that are mutually effective. These tools should adhere to the rules and regulations a client is subjected to while offering the access, speed and quality that agencies require.
A bridge to tomorrow
Collaboration is never easy, especially when it involves sensitive data sets, complex processes and a multitude of teams. However, marketers can help ensure that their agency partners have access to all of the data (including first-party data) that they need to craft powerful strategies and tactics.
By connecting IT, legal and BI teams to their shared goals, marketers can foster strong, mutually beneficial relationships that serve the business as a whole. At the same time, agencies have the opportunity to become trusted partners but helping their clients to build these in-house bridges – thereby fostering a stronger tie to their clients.