Audience Marketing: How To Find Your Most Valuable Customers

Audience Marketing: How To Find Your Most Valuable Customers

While there are many ways to find out who your core audience is, marketers must be aware of these four things in order to fully capitalise on the opportunity, says Marin Software’s Jay Revels.

The direct link paid search establishes between a user and their intent is the primary reason why search remains so successful for advertisers. Delivering an ad, for example, promoting running shoes to a user who is searching for best running shoes represents a revenue opportunity that is hard to match through other channels. Search allows today’s marketers to deliver targeted ads to the consumer, based on a user’s search requests.

Across the digital landscape, advertisers are able to gain a valuable insight into their customers, not just by their search requests but also their digital trail which is the footprint of their intent. Previous visits to product pages, mobile check in and social media updates combined with third party data and offline activity create a targeted understanding of a customer for an advertiser across all channels – not just search.

The integration of audience data in digital advertising exists most commonly in display and is playing a huge role in reshaping the digital landscape for advertisers and marketers. Across the Google Display Network and Yahoo’s digital advertising model, marketers can target consumers by interest categories. However, beyond these networks are four applications of audience orientated data that have far reaching implications for performance marketers.

These include:

Audience Analytics

Performance marketers can make some good assumptions about their customers based on search keywords and conversion tendencies of their users. When structuring search campaigns, advertisers build a catalogue of intent without realising so. For example a travel company creating a budget campaign and a luxury campaign can make assumptions between the users depending on which campaign they gravitate towards. These assumptions can then be populated by additional data such as marital status, age and household income. These insights can encourage an advertiser to rethink their creative strategy.

Audience centric bidding

Once armed with these insights on which types of customers they are acquiring, advertisers may need to rethink their bidding strategy on media. For many, the type of customer is of equal importance to the value of the conversion produced and understanding the projected lifetime value of a customer according to identifiable traits is crucial.

Smarter re targeting

The impact of Google Remarketing Lists has altered the search landscape and has made the retargeting of users on search a reality. In the simplest approach to search marketing, an advertiser can implement strategies for dealing with two audiences: those who have visited a site before and those who haven’t. An advertiser could decide that users who have previously visited the site are more likely to purchase and may bid more aggressively when that audience searches for a keyword. Targeting options are greater once additional first and third party data are added to the mix.

Look-a-like expansion

As advertisers get smarter about understanding their customers it becomes easier to identify users who have a high probability of converting into new customers. Algorithmic tools have made it possible to not only analyse a section of existing customers, but also to break down sections of the same audience who have the potential to convert at a similar rate. This detailed level of insight enables marketers to quickly generate display or social ads targeted at those parallel segments and acquire more like-minded customers.

Search linked with consumer intent continues to prove highly effective and deliver exceptional results for digital advertisers. Tapping into user intent is no longer sufficient for being competition in the new digital landscape. Advertisers looking to stay ahead of the curve and win the battle for online revenue have to continue to invest in new and innovative technology.

Jay Revels is the managing director of Marin Software.




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