Once you have decided on the best way to monetise and sell your data (visit our ‘How to Sell Your Data’ article here), the next step is to market it.
The marketing strategy surrounding your data is just as important as the data itself, since you need to determine your target client audience to see a full picture of your data’s market viability.
You may find yourself asking:
- What value does my data provide?
- Who would want to buy my data?
- How much can I sell my data for?
- How do I find buyers for my data?
To answer all of these questions, you need to create a marketing strategy specifically targeted toward selling data to hedge funds, asset managers private equity and venture capital firms, consultancies and corporations.
At Neudata, we specialise in helping data vendors by introducing them to relevant data buyers that are interested in unique sources of data. Because Neudata sits in between data buyers and data sellers, we’re in a unique position to help you market your data and provide market intelligence about your product. Sign up for a free data listing today and a member of our team will be in touch to discuss your data goals.
How to create a marketing strategy for alternative data?
Marketing your data product will be very similar to the way you sell any other product — it requires a clear and concise sales pitch. Alternative data buyers must be able to quickly understand who you are, how your data will help them, what methods you use to source your data and the price they will have to pay to access it.
Know your customer, and more importantly, know why they would benefit from purchasing your dataset. By demonstrating a deep understanding of your data product, you’ll build trust with the client and establish yourself as an expert in this field.
Explain why the data is useful in investment markets and how it can help fund managers generate alpha (a.k.a. an active return on investment). If you believe your data can help users make better investment decision, your pitch should explicitly highlight how your data will help achieve this goal.
Provide example use cases to give buyers examples of exactly how they can use your data to gain a competitive edge within financial markets.
What should I include in my sales pitch?
Once you’ve structured your pitch to share the purpose, provenance and power of your data, you should then share some information about yourself – who you are, your company background, expertise and client list.
Then detail your data capture methodology:
- How is your data generated?
- Why should people trust it is accurate?
- How will people know it complies with the relevant laws and regulations?
You should also provide case studies and dataset backtests, a copy of your due diligence questionnaire (DDQ) and a data dictionary. Data providers that proactively share their own backtests will give a better impression to potential fund clients — it’s always beneficial to be as prepared as possible when being introduced to new buyers.
Throughout the entire process, you should be totally transparent about where your data comes from, understand your product’s data capture methodology and be forthcoming with any limitations, weaknesses, biases and gaps in the data.
How do I negotiate a trial period with alternative data buyers?
Perhaps the most important topic in marketing your alternative data for the investment management community is to decide how long of a trial period you will allow potential buyers to take.
It’s important to remain flexible with respect to the trial period. If you need to give a fixed timeframe, you should always allow buyers to extend their trials if needed. Giving a buyer too short of a trial period will prevent them from being able to perform an appropriate data evaluation.
You should ensure that buyers remain engaged throughout the data trial process — if they ask to keep the trial data at the end of the agreed-upon period, it’s usually best to allow them to do so since it can provide you with an opportunity to secure a future sale and build good industry connections.
How to find prospective alternative data buyers?
Now that you’ve created the perfect pitch and have prepped answers for all the questions a buyer might ask, how do you actually find people to buy your data?
The most common avenues to explore when prospecting clients are through attending events, listing your data through distribution networks, and proactive reach-outs from your internal salesforce. Naturally these processes will have respective costs associated with each of them, which you should evaluate in relation to their benefits.
Attending events is an incredible way to network with buyers and establish a reputation within the alternative data space.
At Neudata, we run events throughout the year that bring data buyers and data vendors together, such as our Data Insights & Scouting summits, Deep Dive virtual events and our Alt-Dating networking programme. To see the events we have coming up, head over to our events page.
Prospecting can be easier than ever when using a firm like Neudata. We match data buyers to data vendors like yourself so that you don’t have to.
Now you’re ready to go…
When doing your market research, you must ultimately select buyers that are best suited to you and your data. Like any service provider, you have the final say about what happens to your data.
Neudata Provider is a platform specifically designed to help nearly 2,000 alternative and traditional data vendors sell their data and to do so as seamlessly as possible. Since 2016, Neudata has been the only provider of data scouting services that does not require vendors to pay a commission or enter into a revenue-sharing agreement in order to list their data.
Sign up for a free data listing today and a member of our team will be in touch to discuss your data goals.