• by Jess Nelson , September 27, 2017

Salesforce announced the launch of Data Studio on Wednesday, a new data-sharing platform within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The new solution, a result of Salesforce’s acquisition of the Data Management Platform (DMP) Krux in 2016 for $700 million, is designed to facilitate the purchasing of audience data by connecting data buyers and data owners. The platform works as a standalone product, and Salesforce Data Studio also complements the Marketing Cloud’s other platforms such as Email Studio, Mobile Studio, and Advertising Studio.

Salesforce has effectively created a marketplace for data, although the company itself is not the broker. Instead, Salesforce provides the software and infrastructure for data owners to sell their audience insights to others.

“First-party data is the highest-quality data you can come across,” says Raji Bedi, vice president, product management at Salesforce Marketing.  “It comes from the original source and the original touchpoints, but for many marketers the data may be smaller in volume and lack the ability to do full-scale marketing.”

Bedi explains that this is where third-party data comes into play. Although third-party data is generally lower in quality, it is higher in quantity and can fill out the holes of a customer profile.

For example, when an email marketer acquires a new subscriber, that marketer has now gained critical first-party data such as an email address and name, but that’s it. The email marketer’s customer profile has quality data, but it’s not really enough for true one-to-one personalization.

With Salesforce Data Studio, that marketer could purchase third-party data from a variety of sources to fill out the missing information to power more personalized marketing. In addition to helping marketers find the data they’re looking for to deepen customer profiles, it also helps data owners sell their data.

“As marketers get more savvy, they themselves could become data owners,” says Bedi. “This could create independent channel with revenue opportunities.”

Buyers and sellers can communicate and create contract agreements via Salesforce Data Studio, and sellers can codify how and where that data will be used. Salesforce gives publishers control of who receives their data to eliminate concerns that the data is going to competitors.

Bedi says Salesforce Data Studio also segments the data based on quality and fidelity, such as how the data was collected. Knowing the origin of data will be an incredibly important consideration for marketers ahead of the looming implementation of GDPR in Europe next year.

A marketer could also utilize email to access more first-party data to better understand their audience and drive more personalized marketing, says Bedi.

“As a marketer I can utilize Email Studio to shore up my first-party data assets as well, and find more data overlap with owners,” says Bedi.

Salesforce Data Studio is generally available now, and Bedi says Salesforce will be introducing additional features to the platform by the end of the year.