I recently attended #DMWF, which gave me a chance to collate some thoughts on key insights we are currently delivering for clients. Below is a quick summary, which will hopefully help provide ideas for others to further enhance digital campaigns.
Understand your audience through segmentation
Knowing who your customers are and how they behave is marketing 101. Audience segmentation is critical to doing that. Barriers to entry in delivering segmentation are low, the cost isn’t significant, and if the base information you have on your customers is low, it will not limit you.
The real challenge is using the segmentations on a regular basis across all your activity, getting value from them and finally, keeping them updated.
Be clear on what the segmentation you are doing is based on: Know what your major business question is. An insurance provider for example, might try and segment based on attitudes to risk and associated value. As a theme park, you might try and segment based on frequency of visit and associated value.
Enrich your data: Most businesses don’t have all the data they need, so enrich it. Add additional information to individuals and glean increased amounts of insights from them. Build up your in-house data set so you have more comprehensive information for future segmentations.
Add additional insights to the segments/personas: Look into rich new data sets, which are hugely powerful, but rarely utilised. Get creative in social monitoring tools and build up audiences that match your segments. For example, build a profile of people that fall into a category of ‘Busy mum’s’. Understand their challenges and what makes them tick. Understand what they respond to and care about.
Collect first party browsing behaviour: Track the browsing behaviour of individuals on your website and further enhance your segmentation. Start to model and understand what the next most likely action of the individual will be to begin better tailoring communication.
Put someone in charge: Make it the responsibility of someone (agency, or internal) to regularly update audience segmentations. Segments are often done and then forgotten about, which diminishes in value quickly over time. There are ongoing insights which can be gleaned from regular updates.
Optimise digital media activation with your improved data sets
Activate your segmented data within a DMP: Within real time bidding platforms (programmatic), segmented first party data can provide a whole host of benefits for efficiency; for example, targeted creative based on the segment, real time bidding based on modelled business value and look-a-like modelling based on individuals within specific segments.
On-board your segmented data into PPC campaigns: Customer match technology is used within PPC campaigns, but often not based on well segmented or fully understood data. With careful segmentation, custom bidding and creative messages can be applied which can really impact on efficiency.
Understand the appeal of your content: Start to understand the relationship between on-site content and your different audience segments. Better tailor your content and build content viewers into RLSA campaigns who then also receive data driven amends to standard activity.
Create relevant, targeted off-site content and digital PR campaigns: Increased understanding of our audience allows for the development of content which is more likely to deliver a strong response. Browsing behaviour, enriched data, customer value among others are great ways to support the prioritisation of resource (internal and agency) to generate stronger responses.
Build on your CRO campaigns: The use of segmentation data can drive enhanced CRO campaigns. Start developing multi-variate tests based on the segments you are trying to improve efficiency from. An increased understanding into the customer will help tailor messaging, page layout and USP’s; all contributing to improved value from a click.
Hopefully the above has given some food for thought into what you could do today to improve campaigns you are currently running. Anyone starting with an increased understanding of your data, can begin to layer on tests across different media types tailored to your customers and deliver improved ROI.