Due to heavy traffic and oversaturated feeds, digital advertising efforts require more power to break through nowadays. For this reason, 89% of CMOs and marketing leaders say they’re planning to increase their marketing investments in the coming year, with 44% expecting those increases to be substantial despite a heavy recession on its way. 

But is investment alone enough to cut through the noise? Trusted sources of high-quality third-party data could deliver improved ROI for brands across a wide array of verticals. Let’s unpack. 

By layering high-quality, insightful audience profiles onto an online media buy, brands have the opportunity to reduce costs while increasing reach. For brands, working with a data provider to identify an audience profile composed of your avatar buyers is likely to increase engagement and therefore sales.  This ability to leverage third-party data to enhance performance is further leveraged when used in a cross-channel capacity.

For example, an international bank launched a product designed for high-net worth individuals but was having trouble driving its target audience to its website’s promotional pages. So, it turned to its data partner to create a custom audience segment that could help it target and acquire high-quality leads through programmatic advertising campaigns. To promote the new product, the bank activated the new profiles for cross-channel lead generation advertising campaigns across programmatic display and social channels. Across platforms, the custom audience profile reduced the cost per lead by 11%, with Google delivering an impressive 89% decrease in cost per lead.

Using third party data is also a great solution for brands when they find that their trusted marketing tactics are plateauing. For example, a home appliance manufacturer had been using the same targeting strategy for some time and needed to reinvigorate its campaigns and improve performance. The brand worked with its agency and data partner to select audience traits and build a specialised segment that captured customers interested in cooking and baking and who intended to purchase a dishwasher. Compared to other campaigns, the ones using the custom segment saw a staggering 33% increase in click-through rates, a 30% decrease in CPM and a 35% decrease in CPC.

When using data, it should be as customised and predictive as possible in order to boost b-to-b performance and ROI to the furthest extent.