Know your audience - How the Data Flows Within an Organization? - Why CDP? - It's all connected - Create your Audience Strategy - Conclusion
The globally renowned marketing author Philip Kotler once said “There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market”.
Airing an ad during the Super Bowl might seem like a great way to be seen by the masses, but it is also expensive. Furthermore, only a quarter of the viewers would actually be interested in your product/services. On the other hand narrowing down your focus to core audiences helps you to develop an effective marketing strategy and combinations of such audience strategies help marketers to segregate their customers into meaningful segments to deliver personalized messaging and optimize their investments.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience or defining your target audience is not something new in Marketing domain. But the way we identify and structure them is changing with the digital transformation of businesses becoming a new norm across the globe. Typically businesses use demographic/geographic information to define their target audience. But with social media, marketing automation and SEA tools available in the market, it is possible to group users who show similar user journey to create an audience set and train AI/ML engines used by these platform to target users who matches this audience type, but most of them are dependent on user's acceptance of 3rd party tracking cookie .
With the amount of data available in each of these platform, if we focus only on first party data and connect it with layers of interconnected targeting tools to compliment our marketing strategy, we can create a flow to provide optimal results, even in cookie-less future.
Before deep diving into targeting and application interfaces, let's understand what is data flow within each layer of solutions.
How the Data Flows Within an Organization?
There are multiple ways to understand the flow of data and conversion of it in insights for users, it's all about representation of data to make business sense. Data is collected from internal and external sources in the form of touch points, transactions, demographics, events, triggers, deliveries, buying signal, etc. this is a very first layer of the data flow. Depending on the budget businesses can either invest in another layer known as ingestion layer built by multiple engines, to structure the data for the next layer - storage, or can work on possible rules to store the data in desired format (less preferred solution and increases complexity). The ingestion layers are usually set of tools which help the organization to collect similar type of data and process it in a structured way. For e.g. All social media KPIs will be collated by a separate engine to process supply chain related data. Once the data is stored in a structured format, it becomes 'single source of truth' for the whole organization. This data can be processed by different tools, by different departments which brings it to consumption layer by converting further into relevant insights for different level of users.
Why CDP?
Now, from marketing perspective how we utilize these insights, is a topic connected with targeting. Once we have the insights related to channels and customer journey with us, we can take an informed decision through Customer Data Platform (CDP). The CDP helps you manage your audience segmentation and enhances user engagement by delivering personalized and relevant content based on platform and preferences. CDP does a two way communication and seats on top of DAM which helps it to serve the best possible options of customization.
Also, connection with Data lake helps you to fetch e-commerce specific details to focus on post-sales marketing activities. A quick example is when you get an email from Amazon on dispatch and delivery date of an item you ordered. CDP can help you in improving customer retention rate as well.
It's all connected
So we can say in the manifest lingo - "Its all connected" 😉. The future is all about connected software. Each platforms will have its own way of calculating success, first party data and own set of audience. The segmentation planned at CDP level, needs to be based on logic rather than on the end user information. Which means, we target a user who has been part of a specific campaign or interacted with a specific content rather than focusing on demographics only. With audience defined at CDP level, one can define an optimal customer journey resulting in improved customer success.
Create your Audience Strategy
Now we know how the distribution works, let's focus on audience strategy. When crafting an audience strategy, it’s important to locate and understand who your most valuable customer is. While this audience shouldn’t be your only focus, it’s important to recognize the needs and differences of those most likely to support, or continue supporting your business. Focus on re-engaging with customers through re-marketing tactics, your CTR might be low but conversions will be higher. Try using a Smart List, which uses machine learning to determine which customers are most likely to convert and focuses on those users. Once you have a good understanding of your different audience segments along with their needs, the key is to optimize those segments to allow marketing spends to deliver optimal results.
Also consider connecting all of the audience data from your owned channels and campaigns. This will add more intelligence to your overall strategy. Building the right audience segments will help you be more efficient with your marketing spends by enabling you to deliver a personalized communication on the relevant platform in correct format. This will improve the overall customer journey experience for your existing and new customers.
Conclusion
Knowing that your target audience consumes content on a specific publication/platform or watches a certain show means that your ad will be seen by fewer people, but the relevant set of audience, who are most likely to buy your products or services.
Today, the marketing tech stacks have evolved so much that you can not only target the audience who are looking for a solution but with predictive online marketing strategy and tools you can even influence the very first search done by the user. You can develop creative that speaks to specific personas, and develop brands that coincide with the interests and values of those most likely to purchase the product. This is especially important at a time where consumers expect every ads to be personalized and highly targeted.
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