Re-targeting is an established part of most marketers’ digital strategy. Marketers see this an intelligent way to reach customers that have shown a clear interest in their products. However, there is a limit to how much of your own first party data that you can use so how do you reach similar audiences without repeatedly targeting your current prospects?
The principles behind retargeting make a lot of sense. If a user has looked at a certain product or behaved on a website in a way that indicates they are going to make a purchase, then marketers can immediately target that user with a specific advertising message about completing their purchase across a range of different websites and social media channels.
This method of reaching customers is big business in our industry but it’s really just the tip of the data driven iceberg. Many marketers are still only using their own first-party data only. This means, however, that they can only make marketing decisions based on users who have already interacted with their site. This is a very limited dip into the massive potential pool of the overall online population.
Enrich your own data with audience data
Matching the critical attributes of your current audiences with third-party audience data can help brands better understand their highest value customers and target more of them. Once the criteria of a valuable customer profile, for example from a conversion or landing page, is paired with third party audience profiles, a marketer can gain a deeper understanding of what those desirable customers look like. From our experience, advertisers can discover at 3-5 additional audience traits that advertisers may not have known about their audience based on first party data alone.
For example, an online retailer knows what their customers are buying but has limited insight into their interests, age groups, etc. By using audience data, they can gain deeper insight into who is buying what products. The retailer might find that the users buying certain models of TVs predominantly have children in the household and a strong interest in outdoor sports. These then become the audience profiles they can buy for their next campaign. This new information can also help with creative, contextual, regional and seasonal planning.
Finding new audiences
Here’s a step-by-step process of how you can make the data you have make more sense and help you think audience first:
Step 1. Identify the actions that define a valuable user for your business and tag the relevant pages. These might include things like a landing page that displays interest in the product, downloading a brochure or a conversion page.
Step 2. Match those critical attributes with external audience profiles.
Step 3. Discover the profile of your most valuable customer type based on third party data.
Step 4. Use these new insights and attributes to drive the targeting of your prospecting campaigns.
Step 5. You can use this same process to find lookalike audiences or build custom segments - even further expanding your reach.
This process will enable marketers to find new future customers rather than run the risk of over-saturating their existing pool of targets. Consumers are also starting to feel fatigued - 79% of consumers felt like they were being tracked by retargeting ads and those that saw ads more than five times felt angry and after 10 viewing felt mad. Finding fresh audiences means you don’t have to exhaust your existing ones.
Audience data can be used to prospect for brand new consumers, ones that might not have been exposed to your brand before and at a scale far beyond the limits of first party data. Re-targeting is an important part of any advertisers digital data strategy but it mustn’t be the only part.
