Most customers are skeptical about the information that brands share with them. Nearly 34% of the customers don’t trust the brands that are buying from. To provide more relevant information to customers, brands must personalize the experience using audience data.
What is Audience Data? Audience data is information about the people who respond to your advertisements and buy your business’s products or the people that visit your site.
How Audience Data helps you to understand customers?
Research from Bain and Company conducted in partnership with Google reveals that brands who show up the right message in just the right moment are the ones finding pathways to growth and revenue.
Audience data aggregates data about your target audience’s online behavior. Audience data profiles and categorizes into the following buckets:
- Demography: Demographic data capture information like age, gender, income, etc.
- Interests: This segment identifies the audience’s interests like Arts & Entertainment, Sports, Health & Fitness, etc.
- Intents: Captures purchase intent by scoring a set of variables that includes factors like demographics, website engagement, past purchases, interaction with marketing messages, etc.
But audience data is useless if you are unable to extract insights out of it. To gain a deeper understanding of customers, marketers have to understand customer behavior patterns and trends then take actions to reach the right customer at the right time.
Brands can use the audience data in the following ways:
- Create personalized marketing messages for your target groups.
- Segment your data using rules and create separate campaigns for custom segments.
- Targeting the right audience with relevant pieces of information improves the ROI of your digital campaigns.
- Analyze the data captured to uncover new insights on your audience’s behavior.
- Find an audience with similar characteristics to expand your customer network.
- With the help of a data management platform, brands can eliminate bots and ad frauds.
What is Audience Enrichment?
Audience enrichment focuses on enhancing the data that you have already collected about your current audience.
This works by taking your first party data, which includes data collected from people visiting your website and media properties and enriching that information with third party data collected on other websites and platforms.
Audience enrichment creates a more holistic profile of the customer. This enables marketers to create content and marketing strategies around interests, purchase intent, and demographic data of the customer.
Audience enrichment helps the brand by creating a rich customer profile, which allows them to create custom segments, which enables them to develop advanced retargeting and data-driven marketing campaigns.
A research conducted by Oracle found that modeled or data-driven audiences tend to reach significantly more future buyers than demographic targeting and many multiples of general, run-of-site based media.
How Audience Enrichment Works?
Let’s look at an example to understand how audience enrichment can help your brand. For example, you sell shoes through your website. Now, if someone visits your website, you can assume that his person has purchase intent or, at the very least, interest in shoes. That’s great, but you don’t have any other piece of information to confirm your hypothesis. You don’t know the user’s age, gender, income, or whether he has shown interest in buying shoes before now.
However, if you had all this audience data at your disposal, you will be able to make a better decision. Knowing the historical interests of the customer will help you determine whether you are talking to a prospect or someone who was simply lurking on your website. This will enable you to create messaging that is relevant, timely, and actionable for the customer.
Brands can enrich their audience data by utilizing a data management platform that helps them to enrich their data profiles and tie all data pieces together. Connecting with relevant data exchanges help brands to source second and third party data from buyers in a safe, trusted environment. Data exchange also provides brands access with thousands of pre-packaged custom audience segments.
By enriching their data with the help of third party data, brands can discover more information about their customers’ common behaviors or interests and leverage this information to create custom segments.
Conclusion
Audience data has not only enhanced targeting but has also helped marketers to create a more holistic view of the customer. As the quality of third party data improves especially following the implementation of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) – applying a systematic approach to data will help advertisers to ensure relevance and to inform their entire marketing strategy.
