Today’s modern consumer has more choices than ever before. In 2007, market research firm Yankelovich estimated that the average person sees up to 5,000 ads each day. Thanks to universal adoption of the internet and smartphones, that number has exploded with the average person seeing around 10,000 ads per day. This highly competitive landscape has pushed marketers to develop more engaging customer experiences, especially when it comes to more complex purchasing decisions like buying a home or taking out a loan.
In order to deliver the best experience and maximize your marketing dollars, you have to know your customers better than ever before. A one-size-fits-all approach is no longer enough to attract and maintain loyal customers. Consumers now have maximum control over their experience and brands don’t have many opportunities to get it right.
Truly winning over today’s sophisticated consumers requires a robust, data-driven approach. Many companies make the mistake of relying on only internal first-party data alone. This means the marketing team’s insights and ability to target are limited to what they know about the consumer, can collect from the consumer, and what has changed about the consumer.
In today’s landscape, the specific data points that organizations should prioritize can vary significantly. For example, a consumer retail giant, like Target or Walmart, collects information such as a customer’s phone number, address, the average amount spent at their store, and the number of visits to their stores. For these businesses, additional data on household income would greatly benefit marketing initiatives, as it allows them to tailor strategies and offers that resonate with their target audience. On the other hand, think of financial institutions, like Chase Bank. They likely already know household income as it is collected when a client opens their account. However, Chase finds value in obtaining data related to a customer’s home value, as it helps them assess creditworthiness and offer appropriate lending products.
New immersive consumer experiences continue to generate a flood of data across all industries- and companies that fail to put this data to good use are falling behind. Follow along as we discuss how your organization can make more data-driven decisions.
Why personalization matters
According to a 2021 McKinsey Report, 71% of consumers expect personalization and 76% report being frustrated by businesses who do not offer personalized experiences. While there are various factors that influence purchasing decisions, this shows that customers respond more favorably to offers that are timely, relevant, and tailored to how they behave on the internet. This type of personalization shows that a brand is genuinely interested in investing in their customer relationships rather than completing a one-off transaction.
For example, say an individual is looking to purchase a car. This shopping journey has many stages, from the initial research, to comparison shopping, and eventually making a decision on a final purchase. Understanding the consumers’ intent at a given moment and engaging with them accordingly will make all the difference in your marketing efforts. If they’re early in their shopping journey, the information they’re looking for is different than a consumer who is prepared to head to a dealership for a test drive.
In the past, personas have played a central role in understanding, segmenting, and targeting consumers. This involves dividing into groups based on demographics, income, occupation, or location. While this approach helps marketers gain a high-level understanding of various audiences, it falls short when it comes to keeping quality customers engaged. In today’s age, prioritizing timing and behavior in addition to static personas should be top of mind for marketers across nearly all industries.
Identity should be mission-critical
According to a study by TradeDoubler, almost half (49%) of people will ignore a brand if they are bombarded with ads they perceive as irrelevant, while a third (36%), are more likely to buy a branded product that sends them personalized messages. Creating needless friction with your customers through ill-conceived marketing initiatives can compromise credibility and overall brand perception. To better understand the customer journey, it’s crucial to understand when a customer’s shopping leads them to your site and what they’re doing once they reach it.
With most site visitors these days being anonymous, this can be easier said than done. How do you know who’s shopping and what they are shopping for? That activity often goes unrecognized, which makes it impossible to connect to shopping behaviors in the broader market. Consequently, brands struggle to meaningfully engage shoppers that are actively browsing for their products.
Enriching first-party data with additional insights such as an individual’s interests, behaviors, or wealth indicators is key to getting a holistic view of your customers. With this information, marketers can better gauge how to effectively reach consumers across different channels, best paths to upsell or cross-sell, or discover where a person may be in their buying journey, etc When it comes to the criteria for effective identity data, keep in mind the 4cs:
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Current: Millions of Americans change their address each year. Ensuring that you still have accurate information should be a regular practice.
Correct: Ridding your database of inaccurate information maximizes your marketing dollars.
Complete: Third-party data providers can help create a complete consumer profile.
Compliant: Your data must comply with state or federal regulations.
Bridging the gaps
The benefits of better targeting are clear. Engagement, customer experience, brand loyalty, and conversion rates improve when marketers execute a personalized targeting strategy. Effective segmentation requires accurate consumer identity data with rich attributes such as psychographics, online and mobile behaviors, buying propensities, credit risk, purchase history and more.
Partnering with a consumer insights solutions provider empowers brands to reach and convert more customers and prospects by creating highly targeted segments, personalized messaging and driving analytics and data modeling. These strategic partnerships enable brands to instantly gain access to the most complete and accurate information about consumers, exactly when they need it, to make informed marketing and risk mitigation decisions.
First-party data is a valuable asset – it’s the artifact of a consumer who has expressed an active interest and consented to provide their data as part of an interaction. For 2023 and beyond, brands need to focus on building out their first-party data for evolving customers while filling the gaps in consumer profiles. By expanding the full identity of first-party audiences to include key lifestyle and behavioral traits, marketers take control of their data and gain independence in their ability to reach audiences at scale.
