Tom Bowman, CEO at IO, discusses why it’s important to leverage technology to reach your target customers.
We define marketing success as being able to reach the right audience, with the right message at the right time.
However, today’s digital landscape makes it increasingly challenging to establish the who, what and when; and then there is the consideration of device to factor as well.
How can today’s marketers successfully identify these moments where their potential customers are showing intent?
The technology enabling to support such execution is only really surfacing now. Previously, marketers had to make a choice based on the accuracy but limitations of scale associated with direct marketing, or have access to scale without the possibility of accuracy of mass media marketing.
Why audience segmentation has been superseded
In media, trying to match marketers with prospects at scale was always seen as the purpose of context and of demographics.
Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan would refer to this set-up, as the medium being the message – ads are executed in step with media products themselves. This is also one of the main reasons we are seeing more media agencies creating content to match their marketing objectives and not their audiences.
The issue, however, lies in the fact that the message is also defined by the mass age – when audiences were considered as homogenous groups of segments, all with the same interests and needs. Proceeding to buy audience demographics in this way may have suited Don Draper – as the only available tools Mad Men of the 1950’s had were surveys on readership, viewers and listeners.
With the arrival of digital, things were meant to evolve. Contrary to analogue media, the internet is built around a one-to-one infrastructure, and not on the basis of one-to-many. Audiences can now self-select the kinds of content they enjoy from a large diversity available to them, providing advertisers with a wider platform in which to reach consumers, with digital breadcrumbs left by online behaviour enabling tracking and targeting possibilities. This was to be the holy grail but in reality what we got served, has been underwhelming.
The increase of standard online display ads may have been praised, but too frequently the online buying and selling process uses the same principles as print and broadcast ads before them, which is typically demographic targeting by humans, using manual processes. In other words, trying to identify in-market audiences instead of those you think are your audience is difficult to understand.
If we make assumptions solely on the basis that all car owners renew their contract on the anniversary of buying their car, we are ignoring many other factors such as who uses the car and has the existing insurance policy been transferred over. Therefore we are excluding data sources where we may find potential prospects.
To be successful, we need to abandon the idea of homogeneity and focus efforts on being more efficient in identifying what consumers really want and when they want it.
So what does this actually mean for digital advertising campaigns?
In order to be more efficient in finding our right audience we must consider the context to identify the consumer’s intent at any given moment. The environment is more than simply the medium – it is much more complex and profoundly influential.
With programmatic display advertising, you can understand a person’s micro-environment – the type and topic of the medium they are consuming, the channel or device through which they are consuming that medium and when and where that consumption is taking place.
But take into consideration the person’s macro-environment – what other media is being consumed at the same time? Is it raining? What’s happening in the local news? Is the economy up or down? Is there a national sporting event on the horizon? What is social media discussing?
A person’s receptiveness to the message being presented may be significantly influenced by these and thousands of other factors, but the nature of such diverse, timely and localised data make it hard to ascertain, never mind to correlate into manageable media plans. And beyond this, the factors that affect one individual might not affect another in the same way.
Finding the right signals of intent for an individual within this noisy and complex framework seems impossible, but this is where recent advances in machine learning are revolutionising the way in which environment can be considered.
By analysing both the micro and the macro-environment of a person and understanding their influences in real time, as well as their demographic and behavioural profile, cutting edge algorithms can be used to understand the combination of factors affecting an individual and how likely these are to have a positive impact on their buying intent.
Your target audience are constantly evolving and adapting their behaviours and media consumption based on any given number of variables in any one moment. It’s time we harness the power of technology to ensure we adapt along with them.