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This is a guest post contributed by the leading data commerce platform, Narrative I/O.

A brand’s target audience is composed of multi-faceted individuals that lead busy lives, juggling work, family, and social obligations on a daily basis. All of these facets of a consumer’s identity are important to understand in order to paint a full picture of who they are and what they want. But why should brands place emphasis on both personal and professional data and how can they find and collect that data? It can be difficult and time-consuming to acquire the data that will take your company to the next level. We give you a crash course on how you can quickly and easily build a complete profile of your consumers, both at home and at work, in this quick guide.

The importance of integrating personal and professional data into your customer profiles.

With so many distractions pulling your targeted customers in different directions, your audience appreciates being given the products, services, and messaging that is most relevant and useful for them. That’s why it’s so important for brands to tap into every facet of their consumers’ lives and get to know them on every level. Data points on a consumer’s home life and work life build out a clearer picture of who a consumer is throughout their daily life and what they are expecting or seeking from companies and advertisers. Finding, acquiring, and evaluating this data makes it possible for brands to meet and exceed those expectations.

For instance, let’s say that a coffee and pastry shop collects enough data about their core audience to understand that their customers tend to be health-conscious. This data could lead the coffee shop to begin offering healthier alternatives to their pastries, such as vegan or gluten-free options. Now let’s say that the coffee shop takes their data collection and evaluation a step further and finds that these health-conscious coffee-drinkers also tend to work in creative professional roles, such as graphic design or interior decoration. Those who work in creative roles would be more likely to be attracted to fun, colorful, and artsy products or messaging. The coffee shop now decides that to promote their healthy pastries, they will create bright, fun, and artsy marketing materials that will capture and hold the attention of their creative-minded audience.

Because this coffee shop took personal and professional data into account, they now offer a product that their consumers want and are promoting it with more informed and effective marketing. They are targeting their customers more precisely, increasing customer loyalty, reducing wasted spend, and driving revenue. All because they tapped into the personal and professional lives of their customers through data.

How brands can acquire the personal and professional data they need.

Consumers have come to expect that their highly personalized preferences are being met through brand experiences. However, over half of consumers say that brand experiences are not meeting their expectations, despite companies doing their best to make the data-driven decisions that will satisfy their customers. The reason for this is either lack of data or bad data. So how do you find and acquire the quality data that you need?

Your first-party data is important, but it will never fill in all of the gaps needed to understand your consumers on both a personal and professional level. That’s why companies go out of their way to acquire data from external sources and augment the data they already have. However, when it comes to acquiring data, companies have historically not had great options. They can go the most traditional route, which is finding an organization that they want to buy data from, negotiating through legal teams, transferring data through data engineering teams, and waiting months to have the actionable data they need before repeating the process all over again with another company. Or they can go through data brokers, which provide a mashup of homogenized data that may or not be usable. This option is faster, but generally does not provide data that is as transparent and quality as a one-on-one transaction, and companies end up paying for data they don’t need more often than not.

The newest and most effective data acquisition option is using a data commerce platform like Narrative. Data commerce platforms provide seamless access to quality data from multiple providers, which is the key to building a complete and actionable profile of a brand’s audience. It’s a simplified way to get quality data faster while saving money and reducing risk.

Using Narrative’s data commerce platform, most of the data acquisition process is simplified and automated so that you can find and purchase the personal and professional data you need within hours. It’s easy to point and click your way through the entire process without needing to know code or have technical expertise. The custom filters, budget controls, and automatic deduplication also ensure that you only ingest the exact data that you need and never pay for data points you don’t. The best part is you get 100% visibility into every supplier you buy from and what data points you license, so you always know you are getting quality data. It’s as fast, easy, and transparent as online shopping.

AnalyticsIQ is one such source of quality data, offering B2C data and B2B data through Narrative’s data commerce platform and providing advertisers with the data they need to understand their consumers on personal and professional levels. It’s easy to find, access, and acquire that data with just a few clicks and within a few hours so that you can start applying fresh, quality, and actionable data to launch new campaigns, create better products, and make better decisions that will grow your business.

Learn more about how to find and buy the data you need to succeed here or check out the data products that AnalyticsIQ has to offer here!