Data monetization enables your firm to maximize the external value of its internal data. The data that your firm has acquired and used for internal purposes can be incredibly valuable to other companies, and simply sharing that data could provide your company with a completely new source of money.

You may monetize your data assets quickly and successfully by reviewing your own data, taking care to ensure the quality and usability of the data you want to sell, and being strategic while developing your data company and products.

How to Start Selling Your Data

Map and value your data 

To begin your data monetization strategy, you must first evaluate and value your organization’s data. Make sure you thoroughly assess what forms of data you have to offer that are valuable to businesses other than your own. To begin, conduct a complete audit and analysis of the data collected within your organization. This includes information on your processes, transactions, customers, and any other data that your company collects.

Make sure you’re completely clear about the data you want to sell. That means you should understand and be willing to explain how and when your data was obtained, how datasets interact, how relevant and valuable they are, and so on. After you’ve examined your data and ensured that it’s transparent and of high quality, you can move on to the next stage of determining who will buy it.

Determine your audience

No matter what type of data you collect within your firm, external parties are eager to purchase and exploit it. It is critical for your company to identify who those external parties are so that you can tailor your data monetization approach to your target audience.

Think about these questions: Who would find your information valuable? Who would be willing to pay for this? How is your data valuable? Will it assist other firms decrease expenses, streamline processes, improve sales, obtain customer insights, or all of the above? Would organizations outside your industry benefit from the information you have? Identifying an audience will be useful later in your data monetization plan when you are organizing your data and deciding how to promote it to potential customers.

Review policies, laws & regulations   

It’s important to be fully aware of your own company’s policies, procedures, and guidelines before you decide what types of data your organization can sell to external sources. Make sure that you would not be doing your company’s reputation any damage. To ensure you are sticking to your company’s policies and safeguarding your reputation, you must be transparent with your company’s customers that you will be collecting and sharing their data.

This can be done simply by having customers agree to allow location access or accept cookies when interacting with your website, having them agree to terms and conditions when making a purchase, or displaying disclaimers and information about customer data somewhere on your website. It’s also important to assure your customers that their privacy will be protected. 

It’s also important to be aware of the different types of laws, regulations, and other legal issues that surround data monetization. You should be fully aware of all the rules surrounding data collection and data monetization in order to be sure that the data you are sharing is all above board.

Choose a method for selling your data

Now that you have evaluated your data, determined your potential buyer audience, and ensured that you are following all rules and regulations, you are ready to make your data accessible to buyers. There are a few options available for you in order to do this:

• 1. Sell your data directly to another company

By facilitating a direct sale to another company, your business directs a large chunk of time and energy to a single one-on-one negotiation. Direct transactions are straightforward, private, and are securely controlled between your organization and the organization that is purchasing your data. This option provides the most security and control since you and the teams within your organization are solely responsible for overseeing every step of the data transaction.

In order to go this route, you will need to hire data engineers, salespeople, and financial and legal teams to make the transaction a success. It can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process to find companies that will purchase your data, negotiate terms, write contracts, prepare and transform your data, and build connections between systems and platforms in order for that company to officially purchase your organization’s data. 

This process can take months or even years to complete and must be repeated each time your business wants to make a direct sale to a new company.

• 2. Sell your data to a data aggregator 

You can also opt to sell your data to a data aggregator. Data aggregators are organizations that collect data from multiple sources, provide some value-adding processing, and repackage a mash-up of usable data into summarized datasets. Going this route is an easy way to sell a bulk of data quickly and without too much hassle. 

Read Also: Data Monetization Market: Trends and Opportunities

However, you have little control over the transaction and you may not get a favorable price for your data. It’s also more of a gamble to ensure that the data aggregator you sell your data to is reputable, secure, and capable. Data aggregators are notorious for providing low-quality data because they mix a large amount of data together from multiple sources as opposed to providing quality and transparent single-source data.

• 3. List your data on a data exchange or marketplace 

Data exchanges are platforms where data providers and data consumers are able to easily exchange data without having to go through the many steps of a one-on-one direct negotiation. Using a data exchange, you can have all of your profitable data assets available to a multitude of buyers within a fraction of the time that it takes to negotiate a direct sale, and you won’t need a dedicated sales team to drum up demand for your data. It’s also a more reputable route than selling to a data aggregator since you have more control over the data you are providing, how it is being processed, and who is buying your available data.

However, you may not have much traction on these platforms and might not generate a large amount of revenue since you don’t have much opportunity to differentiate your business and your data products from other data distributors within the exchange you are participating in. These marketplaces can also be difficult to navigate and utilize properly without the technical expertise needed to package and productize your organization’s data.

• 4. Leverage a data collaboration platform

A data collaboration platform is the easiest and fastest way for an organization to begin monetizing its data, providing many of the same benefits as the other options without requiring a significant investment of time, resources, or labor. Narrative’s data collaboration platform is an end-to-end data monetization solution that serves as an effective and efficient way to get your data products in front of a large group of potential buyers, without any coding or design experience needed.

Within just a few hours, your organization can build its own custom ecommerce shop front, create easily discoverable data products, market those data products to interested buyers, and simultaneously list your data products in the Narrative Data Streams Marketplace. 

Using the intuitive tools and workflows created by Narrative’s data monetization experts, your business will be able to easily evaluate your data, ingest your data, package and price your data products, create an attractive ecommerce storefront, and automatically collect payouts from customer purchases. The platform makes every step of data monetization easier than ever and maximizes the opportunity for buyers to find your data. 

No technical expertise, including coding or design experience, is required to build your fully functional ecommerce data business. Anyone within your organization can use Narrative’s easy-to-use apps to monetize your company’s data from start to finish, no matter their data analytics prowess. 

From ingesting your native data exactly as it is stored to “tagging” that data to make it easily discoverable to packaging your data into neat products to customizing a beautiful ecommerce store, Data Shops provides a user-friendly solution to every data monetization hurdle. 

5 Ways for Selling User Data

After analyzing and evaluating your data, you’ve decided to monetize it and boost your company’s revenue. This can be accomplished in one of six methods, each with significant implications for your organization.

In general, selling user data means selling customer data. When selling customer data, it must be aggregated, masked, and in compliance with legislation. That manner, your firm can sell data without encountering any legal concerns that could impede revenue or harm its brand.

Let’s take a closer look at the five options for selling user data, including their purpose and how to execute them.

1. Build Better Audiences for Advertising

Data collection from your audiences allows you to make the data that you obtained more sellable, especially to advertisers. The more data received from proper data organization and collection from your audience, the more effective it is to sell your audience instead of your website.

To make it sound more manageable, here’s the deal. If you have an advertiser selling kitchenware, you’d want to place those ads on your site’s recipe section. This is because you’re positive the people who view that section love cooking.

However, a data management platform can change the name of your game. What happens is that the platform creates a group interested in kitchenware and cooking. This gives you more liberty to place kitchenware advertisements within your entire site.

Moreover, the data management platform allows you to sell advertisement spaces to kitchenware companies, regardless of whether your site is about cooking. The DMP ensures it gives you the information you need about what your audiences want.

2. Conduct Data Valuation

Conducting data valuation is critical to establishing better decisions with valuable insights. Remember that a successful data analytics strategy will only work if it prioritizes your company’s most valuable assets.

Subsequently, identifying your most valuable data assets can enable you to be more focused on utilizing your limited resources in the most efficient manner. Moreover, data valuation gives you a specific number of available data assets.

As a business leader, you must also keep in mind that monetary values are critical to driving the success of your business. Moreover, the monetary value convinces your audience that your data is high-quality, relevant, and valuable.

3. Decrease Average CPM

CPM, or cost per mile, is essential in social media, advertising, and digital marketing. Companies utilizing this key performance indicator learn about how much 1000 advertisement impressions cost for the ads placed on their websites.

Thanks to CPM, companies can target larger groups of audiences, even with just a single advertisement. It’s an effective strategy that has driven success in various organizations and professionals.

If you can effectively target the right audience that you’ve built through marketing and advertising campaigns, companies will be willing to pay more to continue placing their advertisements on your website.

4. Grow Your Audience

The only way you can earn more by selling data is by growing your audience. If you want multinational and successful advertisers, you must be able to fulfill extensive targeted campaigns. This is where third-party data can become useful when your company lacks the resources for the campaign’s success.

You might not agree with paying for more data to gain more revenue. But this seals the deal, especially when your data has several gaps. You must be willing to spend more to attract organic traffic to your site and gain new visitors. The more visitors you have, the more impressions your business develops. And this means your ads reach more people.

5. Customize Content

If you want your visitors to stay loyal to your website, you need to create content that will catch their attention. Establish information that matches their interests so they will want to keep returning to your site to view more content.

You can use your data to reveal content that resonate best with your targeted audience. Moreover, your data can also show your readers’ interests, making creating content that matches their hobbies easier.

Conclusion

There are other ways to sell your data, but it is critical to plan out and assess its value. This enables you to discover your target consumers and address their needs, allowing them the freedom to engage with your content and buy more of your data.

Revelate is one option to get started with selling your data. Revelate is a data fulfillment platform that enables you to package, market, and distribute data and insights. This platform enables you to begin selling your data and easily realize its full worth from any location.