The first rule we learn in kindergarten is “Share Everything.” Yet while brands that rely upon a multi-location network of local partners, ie. retail locations, franchisees, or sales reps, understand that big data is key to a National-to-Local strategy, they seem to be unable to find a method to adequately share their knowledge with their local partners. As a seasoned data analyst who’s worked with some of the largest brands, I am all too familiar with the disparities Big Data can create. Sharing Big Data insights can be rife with difficulties for both the national brand and local partners, and security issues loom large. I will explain how you can create a secure symbiotic relationship – sharing and sharing alike – with your local partners to better activate the power of local campaigns and drive big goals on the national level.
Sharing is Caring
Brands have a myriad of sources from which they collect data but keeping that data to themselves to supplement and drive insights to improve only the targeting of their national brand campaigns boxes out the opportunity at the local level. This corporate data hogging leaves local partners struggling to find their own insights within the data generated through their local campaigns/website. Inversely, those insights owned by the local partner could help inform corporate-level strategic planning.
For context: Historically, local partners ran their own campaigns and would send their traffic to the national partner’s website. The global partner “kept” the web traffic data generated by the local partners and used it to build a global view of their business. The local partner had access to only the Facebook data generated by their campaigns, but it gave them a good idea of who was interested in their products at a local level.
In this walled “what’s mine is mine” data divergence, the local partner is blind to the webpages their customers were visiting and the products they were buying from the global partner’s website, and the global partner did not understand the local behavior that brought customers to the website. This results in a web of missed opportunities and a hidden goldmine of optimization strategies. Before we start pointing fingers, let’s acknowledge the operational and technical complexities of sharing data across technologies.
- Data Privacy: There’s a LOT of attention on data privacy right now. Making data sharing easy and secure is difficult. So how do you allow for better activation of local partners without unnecessary risk to the corporate partner? Psst. I have a secret. It can be done. Keep reading.
- Giving Only Part of the Puzzle: Certainly, local benchmarks or recommendations are passed down by larger companies to assist their local partners, but this is rarely effective for the local partners. It doesn’t solve the problem that the parent partner has more information than the local partners and that local insights are easy to miss in this sort of arrangement.
This leaves us with the crux of the problem — the corporate partner has all the data and can’t really share local insights to help local partners, leaving local partners to build their own strategy to meet corporate expectations.
Share and Share Alike
Big Data, when leveraged correctly, can eliminate local partners starting from Ground Zero insight. It can leverage global views and local views, and as local advertisers learn more about their areas, Big Data can help feed the global view with richer market intelligence.
Facebook has made great strides in building out a platform that gathers this data and allows both global and local Facebook advertisers to take advantage of it. Most global companies have a Facebook Pixel installed on their website. This little piece of code works a lot like the Google Analytics code; it pays attention to what visitors do on your website and where they come from. But the Facebook Pixel doesn’t stop there. It allows Facebook Campaigns to use that data to accurately optimize both local and global partners’ campaigns quickly in a virtuous, symbiotic data cycle.
Local partners can instantly obtain data that bolster their campaigns through more effective targeting via first-party data sets. Add to that the knowledge local partners have, and they can hit the ground running with campaigns. The more traffic local partners generate, the more data is shared with the global partner, allowing national partners to gain a more holistic view of their business. Big Data can allow companies to grow from a “keep away” mentality to a symbiotic relationship that empowers better business on a local and global level.
Symbiosis Made Simple (and Secure!)
Tiger Pistol purpose-built this symbiotic relationship into our technology, allowing us to securely access a global partner’s Facebook Pixel data and leverage it for local partner campaigns. With the ability to share this data securely, not only do you fill up national partner’s data banks with more granular, better data on a local level, you’re also giving better insights to local people because they now can target people they may have missed just building from scratch.
Now suddenly it’s less of a struggle with the local partner feeling like they have to meet, in their eyes, unsubstantiated benchmarks, guide-marks, or goals. Now they’re contributing to the overall plan, making it easier to set more realistic goals, while also expanding their own local insights to grow themselves.
For the global partner, this security also allows them to offer their network exclusive access to first-party data they wouldn’t otherwise have. This is an invaluable value proposition for franchise and services groups that rely on opt-ins from their sales network of locations or agents.
Through Tiger Pistol, global brands can quickly share data and distribute thousands of local campaigns, making a robust, data-driven, global-to-local social program possible with ease and efficiency.
Want to reap the rich data benefits of Tiger Pistol’s global-to-local social advertising approach? Request a demo today!
