How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people An icrossing point of view By Mark Iremonger, Chief Strategy Officer This document contains proprietary information of icrossing Ltd.
How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people December, 2014 Today our consumers are more connected than ever before. Ongoing developments in areas such as wearable tech and the ubiquitous web will only see this increase. Constant connectivity is bringing an end to the traditional nine to five retail hours, customer service is demanded around the clock and information is required instantly. To say that one key to growing your business or brand is to focus on a smaller audience, who might cost more to find sounds like reverse logic, but it s not. Evidence shows that adopting a data led approach to create audience relevance is vital to get cut through in today s noisy, digital world. Understand your audience to find and create those moments with your brand that really matter to them. Last year we published an icrossing point of view that heralded the end of search as we know it and the rise of audience based search marketing. Just over 12 months later, we wanted to revisit the topic. We will look at how understanding an audience to find and create valuable brand interactions will result in more meaningful relationships with customers that will increase their value. Reach and Relevancy Day-to-day in the agency we talk about the balance between reach and relevancy. When plotted against each other we look to move our reach as far as is appropriate to the right in order to better identify and understand an audience so we can be more relevant to them. Making them more likely to purchase, and therefore drive greater return from marketing activity. This is a shift away from the approach of one campaign for one million people, towards a much more targeted approach. It allows us to better understand audiences and give them what they need. Ultimately it is about taking a customer centric approach and it is this that is really at the heart of audience marketing. How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people 2014 Page 1 of 5
icrossing, 2014 In practical marketing terms, it moves away from tactics such as large scale door drops, to more tailored communications on a smaller scale, for example serving a user who has displayed intent signals we can identify through search, web analytics and 3rd party data sources. These digital data signals can be layered on traditional customer segmentation methods to better identify and understand audience groups. For example, a recent client campaign with Visit Wales focused on two target demographics of pre family explorers and active family explorers to spark their interest in Wales as a destination. Our research and insight team combined Google Analytics, a specially commissioned survey, Hitwise and the client s own audience data to identify key drivers for each group. Analysis revealed that pre-family explorers are creative, spontaneous and adventurous. The key was to focus on the ease and freedom of a trip to Wales compared with going further afield. Active family explorers had little time for themselves, but were driven to help their children succeed. For them we needed holiday ideas to focus on the potential for kids to learn new skills. Going back to the reach and relevancy scale above, it clearly shows that at either end of it there is waste. Trying to target one million people with the same message will not resonate with everyone, and at the other end, the resource required to generate one million individual campaigns becomes impractical, or simply becomes a programmatic effort that self-optimises without getting to real customer insight. We aim to find a sweet spot where we can target an audience group in the moment. It is the point on the scale when reach and relevancy meet to allow for highly targeted, related content that resonates. The data that delivers this is more than just transactional; you have to layer on audience data, historical data and seasonal trends to pull together a clear picture of your customer s intent, and context. How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people 2014 Page 2 of 5
When it comes to using data, brands need to have the confidence to target fewer people in a much more considered way to allow them to improve the relevance of their messages. This will give each customer a more meaningful experience with the brand at a moment that is right for them. There are technology solutions out there that can help do this, we use a mix of partner providers and proprietary technologies such as SearchAi, which gives us access to data on the millions of consumer interactions with Hearst content websites. What does it look like? In order to apply this approach we need to understand and apply data from multiple sources to create a rich understanding of an audience group. We call this being data fluent. It is about understanding how people behave online in the wild as opposed to just asking them what they do, to better understand the audience, and their intent (or context). In a practical application for a luxury travel company offering high-end holiday packages, we layer data from different sources and identify moments that matter and target an audience something like this: icrossing, 2014 We view the positive and negative indicators as to whether someone is likely to make a purchase based on historical transactional data, demographic data and other third party data sources. Positive indicators may be something like they have visited the brand s site in the last two days. Negative could be that they have been served numerous ads and are yet to click through. By overlaying data sources, we are able to identify those common trends against the How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people 2014 Page 3 of 5
positive and negative indicators of purchase. In this example our research showed that mortgage free individuals with no children at home and an interest in cruises were more likely to be interested in the travel product than those who fit the negative indications such as recently researching 3 star accommodation options, air fares and, most interestingly unlikely to convert on a Thursday, or if they were Android users. We then go one step further to lay context over the top of the data, drawn from insights; we can start to see those particular moments that are relevant for the audience, in this case a Ruby wedding anniversary. icrossing, 2014 The context provides us with the information around the why for the potential purchase so that we can communicate with the potential customer in the most relevant way, with the right tailored content, at the right time. The example below shows the significant increase in ROI this approach can achieve. With straightforward media buying using site targeting a CPM (cost per thousand views) of 1.39 was achieved with a CPA (cost per acquisition) of 22.61. By layering multiple data sources the CPM increased to 2.52 but the CPA reduced significantly, to 2.72, leading to an ROI 8 times higher. How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people 2014 Page 4 of 5
CPM CPA ROI Site targeting 1.39 22.61 1.1 Site targeting + demographic data 2.47 10.79 1.9 Site targeting + in-market data 2.52 2.74 8.9 NB: anonymised data, 2013 campaign comparison This approach can drive real value for brands. Often in the world of marketing we can get lost with technical jargon, fixations on statistics and trends that we can sometimes forget that we are talking about people, who have lives, needs and aspirations. Digital provides us with more insight about our audiences than ever before; this information suggests someone s hobby, a future holiday plan or a guilty pleasure. It s someone wanting to find out the right type of nappies to buy for their new born child, or what phone gives them the best battery life so that it lasts their commute, or what to buy their partner for their Ruby wedding anniversary. We have the opportunity to use digital data to provide a more personal and tailored experience for a customer. It s that tailored experience that tells a customer that a brand is thinking of them, not in a pushy way, but in a useful and informative way to help them find a solution for their particular need or problem. The wonderful thing about the digital revolution is that we are now in a position to do this better than ever before. How to grow your brand; pay more, for fewer people 2014 Page 5 of 5