In this “Back to Basics” post, we are exploring the topic of Audience Enrichment. Miles Pritchard, Lotame’s Director of Market Solutions, wrote a piece entitled “Retargeting 2.0” that explores the topic of Audience Enrichment, which he recommends as the next step for people who want to go beyond basic retargeting in their marketing strategies.
In this post, let’s unpack what audience enrichment is, what it can do for your data driven strategies, and how you can use audience enrichment to create personalized marketing and advanced retargeting campaigns.
Audience enrichment is a way to further enhance the data you have already collected about your current audience. 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 — these are the audience segments you will want to target during future marketing campaigns. The way audience enrichment works is by taking your first-party business data, like the data you gathered on people visiting your website and media properties and enriching that information with third-party data such as data gathered on other websites and platforms.
Audience enrichment enables advertisers and publishers to combine website data they already have on customers and leads with data gathered on those same users while they roam the internet. This tracking and data collection creates a full picture view on your consumers. You are then able to create content and marketing strategies around the interests, behavior, and demographics of your data. You are also able to see if there are possible markets of people you make have been missing, but are a great opportunity, for your campaign.
The valuable result of audience extension is a rich customer profile of your various audience segments, which can then be used for advanced retargeting and data-driven marketing campaigns.
Imagine creating rich target audiences based on behavioral data gathered from your website analytics, but then further differentiating your segments based on demographics, interests, purchase behavior, and even psychographics and emotional characteristics.
The potential here is massive for those wishing to improve their campaigns. As an advertiser or publisher, having more data puts you in a better position to make well-informed, creative judgments on your marketing and retargeting campaigns.
By increasing the amount of “known data” you have on your website audience, you can build richer audience profiles that will enable you to generate tiered retargeting campaigns, launch personalized marketing campaigns, and create more creative advertising solutions for your clients.
This is the power of audience enrichment.
While many analytics platforms provide useful audience data to inform campaigns, there are also gaps in the data that can result in poor targeting and wasted dollars.
For example: I sell vintage cars through my website. Now if someone visits my website, I can make an assumption that this person has purchase intent, or at the very least, an interest in vintage cars. That’s great, but what other data pieces do I have? Not a lot at this stage. I don’t know this user’s age, gender, income, and if this user has demonstrated an interest in vintage cars before now, or if they are interested in anything other than vintage cars.
However, what if we actually have all this additional audience data at our disposal? Knowing their income groupings could determine whether we show a sales message or full price; historical interests could define whether we are speaking to a hardcore enthusiast or a fair-weather fan; age and gender could determine imagery, color and tone of creative. You are able to create your messaging around your target audience instead of create messaging that you hope your high value groups will like. The possibilities of your campaign strategy are limitless when you are using a data collaboration platform.
Improving your return on investment often starts with your target audience. By gaining a better understanding of your high value groups you can spend time on your messaging and strategies while knowing that that your carefully crafted campaign will reach the audience you want it to. Larger data sets are a fantastic opportunity, rather than something that takes up your time, when you are using a data collaboration platform. A DCP provides you with a system that makes your larger data sets from audience extension more manageable for time-efficient data analysis. DCPs assist you in combining first-party data and audience exchange in order to create a better marketing experience for your customer and hone in on your target segments.
And what about exclusion? Ever wanted to use business and marketing data to differentiate your marketing campaigns between a high value and low-value target? Well, enrichment works for audience creation and exclusion.
Audience enrichment enables you to tie your various data pieces together, thus allowing you to save budgets which would have previously been spent trying to re-engage a user that isn’t likely to convert, or will ultimately yield a low return on investment.
Tying first-party behavioral data with third-party data is vital in not only qualifying the lead but also serving extremely targeted ads. Larger data sets provide more statistically accurate data analysis which is a huge benefit when creating campaign strategies. You are also able to understand your audience better and use data-driven strategies that will lead you to a higher ROI.
However, advertisers aren’t always particularly well set-up to collect and organize this data easily and efficiently. If they do collect large data sets of detailed information, it’s usually towards the very end of the conversion process and the data capture forms can be long which can cause them to have high abandonment rates which is then missed data collection. Ask the company you want to collect data from how they collect their data in order to make sure you have the best data possible for your strategy. With an larger data set and ensuring it is accurately sound you can generate the best strategies and campaigns possible for your target audience’s.
Utilizing a unifying data system like Lotame’s data collaboration platform, Spherical can help you tie your data pieces together and enrich your audience profiles with a wealth of information provided by the Lotame Data Exchange. The Lotame data exchange platform is a trusted network of third-party providers ready to bring you the audience segments you need in order to optimize your campaign strategies.
As a result, advertisers have the unique ability to generate more known information, like common behaviors or interests, about their user base and are able to create audiences based on this information.
If you’d like to learn more about audience enrichment and how integrating third-party data can positively impact your data strategy, contact us for more information.