Earlier this year we took you through a 101 course on custom audiences, and now you’re ready to level up. You’re already using audiences to personalize your messaging–so how can you get even more in depth? What’s the next step?
We all juggle work, home, school, family and social or interest based groups. To connect personal data and business data, we start with a B2C link. According to a recent study from McKinsey, 67% of respondents want relevant product/service recommendations, and 66% want messaging tailored to their needs.1. Business and consumer data means you can connect your audience’s:
1. Personal and professional emails 2. Values and hobbies with what industry they work in 3. Work from home status with how many kids live in their house 4. Household Income with their transaction and buying history
This allows you to identify Elaine, who owns a small landscaping business, and then connect her personal demographics to create a whole picture of her–she’s 58, is married with one grandchild, and she goes to dog shows with her purebred chihuahua on weekends. Send emails to both her personal and professional emails to reach her wherever she goes. You used to just see her as either a business owner or a dog lover, but now you can connect with her from several angles.
Start with audiences we’ve compiled, like education focused adults with children, folks who support their hometown through animal rescue, food pantries or other causes, or people spending more time with their pets. Then customize from there with enriched data.
Find your current customers or your best leads on channels they use frequently and most likely to engage. While we have seen lift in reaching an audience through multiple channels and consistent messaging, we realize that they may prefer and engage with particular channels based on their preferences and their relationship with the brand.
Email is still key in driving engagement with all audiences, existing and new. According to Statista, there are 4 billion daily email users and this number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.2 When you send the right message to the right audience at the right time, not only is your customer’s experience improved, but it drives up open and click through rates. Email is a great channel for long-form educational content, detailed information, and special promotions.
4.67 billion people use social media.3 Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Whatsapp lead the pack, but Tiktok is becoming more and more popular. So the question is, do your consumers convert on social? Data Axle, specifically, has purchase records representing 100+ million households so that you can gain insight into real world buying behavior. With information like this, you can segment your audiences based on where they convert, and onboard your current audiences directly into social media platforms through offline to online matching.
87% of adults watch Connected TV, and 46% watch it daily.4 That’s a large opportunity for you to get your message in front of people who are uniquely engaged in the content in front of them. The ads you used to direct towards cable or network TV can now go more accurately to the same people through CTV–but you have a better ability to personalize the ads each household sees. Instead of a pay and spray approach to TV ads, you can put certain content in front of certain audiences.
Direct mail is still important and can be a key aspect of your omnichannel strategy. Gen Z isn’t used to receiving mail, so it’s an exciting thing for them. Meanwhile, older generations still rely on mail for important communications. With post office incentives and informed delivery, you can connect the real world and the digital world easily.
Many people consider gamers a “niche” audience, but actually 215 million Americans play video games every year.5 That means that some of your best customers can be found not only on social platforms, but also while they play Candy Crush in the waiting room and League of Legends after work. Gamers can be any demographic–male, female, old, young; over half of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers play daily or multiple times a week (and a whopping 45% of the silent generation plays that often, too). 75%6 of gamers play on their phone–in 2022 alone $24B was spent on mobile gaming.7
How can you optimize your ads for in-game play? Well, some ads work really well in-game:
On the other hand, ads that obscure the whole screen and interrupt game play are less likely to engender a positive relationship between the gamer and your brand.
Think about adding in-game advertising to your next omnichannel strategy; the reward might be greater than the risk.
Sometimes data enrichment is data that you can facilitate gathering. If you want to customize your digital audiences even further, the next step might be more simple than you think.
Ask them what they want to hear about, know about, or do.
It can be that simple. For instance, if you’re running an acquisition email campaign, include a little questionnaire in the email, one that asks them which topic, product, service or idea is more interesting to them. Then, shift the people who click on the different categories into new, more streamlined segments. Audience participation is a powerful tool to use not just to nurture your data set, but to empathize and understand your customers better, and provide them with more personalized content, services and products.
Now, with your clear understanding of who your customers are, what channels they convert on, and what they want to hear about, you can use digital audiences to really personalize communications.
With geofencing, a technology that allows you to target folks within a certain area, you can get that even more localized. Geofencing isn’t helpful if your message is just about a general sale. It’s really successful if when audiences get your message, they say, “oh, I’m right near there. I’ll stop by after work.”
This month we celebrate Father’s Day, and with it an opportunity to send messaging that focuses on who each consumer is. According to the National Retail Federation, consumers in 2023 expect to spend an average of $196 this year on Dad.8 As we suggested during Mother’s day, you can bring Dads in to take advantage of deals meant only for them.
You already know some of this: if you want to connect with parents, show pictures of smiling kids. If you want to connect with teens, show pictures of groups of friends having a good time.
But you can be more nuanced. Dads who sail and Dads who go to rock concerts can get different pictures that appeal to their specific interests. In fact, when you know more about your audience, your creative content and copy can be more interesting than if you want to appeal to every single father.
55% of customers now trust companies less than they used to.9 But over half of customers will pay more for products and services and purchase more often from a company that they’re loyal to. Loyalty or rewards programs help you nurture your relationships with your best customers.
Data Axle worked with Marriott to help them identify weak points in their email communications– they were getting fewer bookings in December, and fewer click throughs on their emails. A loyalty program provided personalized content like account status, updates, curated content, and milestones achieved based on each user’s yearly activities with Marriott.
Predictive modeling is only getting more sophisticated and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help bridge the gap, by generating predictive insights—such as likelihood to churn—from your first-party data.
Look-alike modeling takes characteristics of your ideal current customer and goes to find more leads that look just like them. The model can help with a number of different things, from data clean up and keeping your data fresh, to keeping new leads coming in, to predicting, based on past behaviors, what consumers and audiences are likely to do in the future (taken with a grain of salt, of course!).
So let’s say you want to tell people about your new home renovation financing options. You can start with an “off the shelf” digital audience that focuses on families with school aged children, and then get more detailed. You might want to create messaging specifically for various decision makers: the Dads, the Moms, the other family members like Grandparents who may live there, too. Next you segment for location, then for the channels each person sees and interacts with most regularly.
All these different types of people with different situations get messaging and content that meets their needs.
Consumers are looking at more digital channels than ever before. The third-party cookie is going away. Consumer behavior and privacy concerns continue to shift and disrupt advertising. So it’s more important than ever for companies to lean on trusted data partners who they can work with as a team. Data Axle knows how important these concerns are. Our data is built and sourced from offline signals, so cookies are not an ingredient used in our audience generation. When we have worked with you to create your custom digital audiences, they can be onboarded to your DSP, DMP, or platform of choice.
Don’t be afraid to put your first-party data to work. There are strategies to help you audit, enhance and activate your first-party data by determining hygiene & enhancement needs, conducting insights with business analytics, building personas and much more.
Ask us about how you can leverage digital audiences in your next campaign.
1 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/ 2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/255080/number-of-e-mail-users-worldwide/ 3 https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/ 4 https://leichtmanresearch.com/survey-87-of-u-s-adults-own-connected-tv-46-watch-daily/ 5 IAB: Finding Success With In Game Advertising, 2023 6 DISQO, How Brands Can Get In the Game, 2023 7 Data.ai, State of Mobile, 2023 8 https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/consumers-spend-record-amount-fathers-day 9 https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-loyalty-statistics
In his role as Senior Vice President of Technology Solutions, Sal is engaged in managing a corporate-wide product vision and strategy to create and maintain leading-edge marketing products and services that are consistent across all divisions. He is known throughout the industry for his consultative approach to identifying solutions for clients’ database marketing and data processing needs.