Jascha Metin, Senior Sales Consultant at GfK, shares insights into the power of using geodata on the regional distribution of purchasing power, consumer preferences, and other location-specific factors to enhance audience profiles, enabling brands to optimize engagement with their target customers across digital and social media channels.
GfK has a reputation as one of the world’s largest data intelligence and analytics partners. Can you share more information about the GfK business?
GfK has more than 85 years of experience in combining data and science to help our clients make the right business decisions. Together with the attention to detail and advanced AI, GfK provides clients with world-class analytics that deliver not just descriptive data but also actionable recommendations – helping to boost sales, as well as organizational and marketing effectiveness.
The Geomarketing side of the business focuses on delivering highly detailed, region-sensitive data insights on a diverse array of consumers, products and markets. We combine these data insights with our software and expert consultancy to give our clients a sophisticated suite of tools to solve their location challenges. To put it in another way, we bring clarity to the location decisions businesses face by analyzing the geographic component of their company information and market data. This reveals trends and relationships in their operations and markets that would otherwise be very hard or impossible to spot. On the basis of these insights, marketers and advertisers can then align their communication strategies with regional variations in consumers and markets.
Why have you chosen to partner with Eyeota?
We were impressed with Eyeota’s proven experience in making offline data available to online advertisers using an efficient onboarding methodology. Data privacy is also a top priority for GfK, so we wanted to partner with a provider who shares this same commitment.
Another factor was the desire to match our extensive data offering with a provider who can deploy these insights to the relevant users and markets, worldwide. Thanks to Eyeota’s relationships with media agencies and brands, we were confident they could connect our data insights to online advertisers in order to support more targeted communications.
How are GfK audiences relevant for advertisers?
Despite an ever more digital world, the “where” questions have not diminished in importance: Where are consumers with certain product or brand preferences located? Where are cities or regions with especially high purchasing power? Where are consumers with a certain lifestyle or shopping profile to be found? And so on.
Our data provides these insights, allowing advertisers to supplement information about online behavior (e.g., through cookies) with geographic details, such as the regions where consumers with certain characteristics actually live. This makes it possible to connect with these consumers in a more personalized and region-sensitive way, such as through marketing or advertising campaigns tailored to the wealth level, product preferences and prevailing shopping behavior in the locations in question.
How should advertisers best use GfK's audience solutions?
Our data insights offer a detailed portrait of the regional distribution of spending potential for a wide range of products and services. This includes purchasing power for online and offline spending on numerous segments, such as the automotive, holiday travel and financial services industries. We also offer data that segments consumers based on how their values, goals, lifestyles, purchasing behaviors and product expectations impact their spending decisions.
These insights allow advertisers, marketers and social media specialists to identify geographic regions with high concentrations of their target group. For example, this could be consumers with above-average purchasing power for their offering or consumers whose preferences make them receptive to a certain communication style. The benefits of this are clear: By understanding how consumer attributes vary from region to region, advertisers and marketers can geographically tailor their campaigns and messaging for maximum impact.
By way of example, consider a credit card company that wants to implement targeted advertising on its social media channels for a new premium card service. By cross-referencing IP addresses with our data on financial services, the company can focus its efforts on consumers who live in regions with an especially high spending potential for credit cards. The company can then further fine-tune its campaign and tailor its message by identifying the predominate consumer type in these regions using our segmentation data. This results in a much more personalized and efficient communication strategy.
What are your plans in terms of your data offering for 2021?
We are continually updating and expanding our data offering and other geomarketing solutions. For example, we release new purchasing power data for all of Europe on a yearly basis. This ensures our clients have access to the latest information to support their marketing, advertising and sales efforts. We also strive to increase the detail of our existing coverage, which allows users to get deeper, more granular insights into their markets. Our experts are hard at work to extend our coverage to include new countries and data innovations, so that clients have an objective and multifaceted basis for planning and coordinating campaigns across national boundaries.
With Eyeota, GfK Audiences are available in Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the US for digital campaign activation on display, video and social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. For more information about GfK, connect with an audience specialist today at datadesk@eyeota.com.
