Advertisers today face new challenges working in amongst the complexity of a multi-channel advertising environment. Along with these challenges, they also need to have the skills and technology to utilise a host of different engagement channels that are available to them.
The game is changing and advertisers need to be more sophisticated in how they are able to view and subsequently target their audience, enabling them to deliver the right message, to the right person, in the right channel, at the right time. The ability to better target specific groups allows advertisers to view the modern ecosystem as a multi-channel data and technology platform that is driven by performance and underpinned by return on investment (ROI). The intelligent use of data plays a huge role in this process.
Knowing who to target
One of the most over-looked commodities when it comes to advertising and marketing is data, from which powerful results and conclusions can be drawn. Without access to raw data and the means to apply this data, businesses cannot make truly informed decisions on how to target and engage consumers, particularly when trying to do so in the increasingly complex and fragmented multi-channel environment.
One of the key challenges of the modern multi-channel ecosystem is to know who your audience is, but this is also where the correct application of data can help to build a stronger and more robust view of your customers. For example, simply knowing the gender, age, and recent activity of customers on your site can be an invaluable guide to a customer group’s passion points, as well as what they may be looking to purchase in the coming weeks or months. Combining cross channel data adds a new kind of consumer insight, allowing businesses to build a 360 degree view of its existing and potential customers, unified across all platforms. These insights influence decision making in real time delivering campaign optimisation and feeds future campaign planning.
Identifying where your existing and future customer are
The online marketing industry is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace. As such, businesses must be able to pull data from across all the platforms on which they engage with customers. By knowing where customers are both online and in their purchase journey, businesses can achieve much higher response rates to advertising, while also reducing the negative feedback that untargeted ads can induce.
Building a detailed profile of your audience also allows a business to target new groups that may have been previously overlooked. This audience modelling can make the customer acquisition process markedly simpler, by leveraging data on your current users to find your next customer. For example, defining high indexing consumer attributes which are not based on the endemic or obvious, but extracted from the wealth of data previously mentioned. This targeting will continue to be reviewed, optimised, and expanded with each campaign.
Getting it right
While some still undervalue the data they have available to them, businesses can use this intelligence to truly understand who their customers are, where they are, when they are ready to engage and how best to get their attention. This is all underpinned by data that many businesses already have at their disposal, but simply aren’t utilising to its full effect. In an increasingly complex and multi-channel world, successful customer acquisition and retention is intrinsically linked with the intelligent use of data and the technology platform to deliver it in an evolving online ecosystem.
