As new marketing technologies continue to emerge, targeting and expanding customer reach is becoming increasingly complex. With a customer’s journey spanning across a number of platforms and touchpoints and generating a wealth of data, it can be difficult to extract meaningful insights and align this to a strategic focus.
It is crucial to be smart around leveraging customer data to develop an in-depth understanding of who your customers are and how to best reach them. So what do blue chip companies such as Uber, Walmart and 20th Century Fox have in common? They all demonstrate how data driven marketing is being used to segment their audience and map online identities to better understand the marketplace and better connect with customers.
Sourcing, organising, and drawing insight from customer data is what drives authentic interactions, resulting in higher propensity to buy or convert.
Your relationship with a customer starts long before they use your product
In a world where your customers are constantly overwhelmed by multi-channel brand messaging, the relationship you build with your customer starts even before they use your product.
In the early stages of engagement, it can be a challenge to pinpoint who your ideal target audience actually is. For example, within the film industry, a customer’s first touchpoint with the product is often long before the release of a film, and instead begins with a film’s first trailer drop.
For this reason, 20th Century Fox has embedded LiveRamp into all stages of product release.
By putting a strong data process in place, 20th Century Fox can identify who is most likely to engage with their product and in turn, tailor communications to target audiences.
Drawing insights from customer data in the early stages of product release is a valuable metric as it enables your brand to adapt accordingly and nurture a strong relationship with your customer.
More data doesn’t necessarily mean you need to make more contact with the customer
While access to more data can unlock opportunities for increased touchpoints with your customer, spreading your message far and wide is not the most efficient or cost-effective way of marketing.
Behavioural data and timeliness of communication plays a pivotal role in increasing the propensity to buy or convert . If you feed your audience untimely and irrelevant content, it can often lead to frustrations that can lead them to disengage with the brand.
By using LiveRamp’s identity resolution technology to resolve their customer’s online and offline identity’s back to an individual, Uber is able to gain a holistic understanding how to appropriately scale their campaigns.
To avoid misplaced messaging, Uber utilises LiveRamp’s IdentityLink to de-identify users, segment their audience and identify whether they are targeting the right customers. From this process, Uber takes these learnings and applies them to future campaigns.
Uber recognised that volume of communication does not always equate to a stronger relationship with consumers. Audience suppression strategies are put in place to avoid inappropriate targets, such as those who have already been converted, and putting time and advertising budgets into targeting the right people.
Constant measurement can help with uncertainty
Executing measurement campaigns at different times enables marketers to gain a wholistic view of the marketplace, achieving a faster execution of strategy and a more efficient spend.
Putting metrics in place to help determine whether consumers are engaged is a valuable exercise, as it provides an opportunity to course-correct and adapt communications to better fit the target audience.
While there is often little certainty on who the target is within the film industry, 20th Century Fox have kept ahead of the game through using LiveRamp’s people-based marketing measurement across all stages of product development.
The data drawn from these metrics have enabled the company to learn from audience behaviours to more efficiently navigate in the marketplace.
Be smart with who you target and when
The ability to connect a person to an online identity unlocks enormous opportunities for brands looking to target their audience with a tailored marketing message.
Walmart Labs, the technology arm of retail giant Walmart, uses LiveRamp’s identity resolution to connect consumers shopping in stores with their online activity. Identity resolution aggregates disparate pieces of data to form a single ID that enables marketers to develop a better understanding of their target customer.
Through identity resolution Walmart can map the online identity of customers to help broaden their understanding of consumers, predict customer behaviours and inform their campaigns.
Blue chip organisations like Uber, Walmart and 20th Century Fox offer us some valuable lessons in what is possible in data-driven marketing. To discover more ways to get started, download your free e-book here: 180 Ways to Use Third Party Data