Creating a post-demographics media strategy in the age of data-driven marketing
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research Consulting blog.
In a digital age, marketers have amazing options. Now we can remarket to users who abandon shopping carts, target users who are reading content that reveals relevant interests, and target paid advertising to Facebook users who share the same interests as those who have liked our brand page. Even TV advertising is becoming targeted with 60 MM + households now being addressable. We can even match our customers to website visitors in the Facebook exchange or to Twitter profiles and deliver promoted tweets to our users on their smartphones. Cross-screen marketing V1.0 is here.
We are moving into a post-demographics, data-driven era in which behavior-based media strategies offer recency, relevance, and reinforcement targeting — recency, because it has been proven that ads delivered closer to the upcoming purchase are more impactful; relevance, because the right message to the right consumer at the right time and place is more valuable to the consumer; and reinforcement because most of the consumers who prefer your brand still buy your competitors and as many as half switch away over time.
How does a marketer position itself to succeed with data-driven marketing?
- Focus on what you hope to achieve. How will data-driven marketing improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness?
- Develop a big data strategy. What data streams will you leverage for marketing gain? How are they going to be connected? Create the infrastructure to manage your brand audience (customer or website) data, your ad response data, and implement a well-thought out tag management approach.
- Enumerate the plays in the playbook. What specific behavioral targeting options are available for you to choose from?
- Equip the organization. Someone needs to own this. They need staff with data science competencies. Create a culture of constant experimentation with a measurement approach that tells you if a campaign is working and if the brand is getting stronger as a result.
- Change the marketing research mindset. To join the data-driven marketing party, we must harvest insights and metrics from naturally occurring data, think more about prediction than report cards, and realize that marketing in a digital world calls for near real-time response systems that come from sources other than long-form surveys.
- You cannot control reach, but you can measure it. A behavioral media strategy is too complex to design the percent reach. Yet reach is important so you must measure it as an outcome and then adjust. However, don't just think about consumer reach; consider shopper reach — what percent of those ready to buy are being reached by your brand messages?