People-Based Marketing Can Help Brands by Targeting the Customer and His Needs, Instead Of Relying on Devices, Thereby Delivering a Cohesive Customer Experience

Believe it or not, but the now popular term – People-Based Marketing – was introduced to the world by Facebook. Strange as the origin of the term may seem, it only highlights the importance of this approach in terms of behavioral marketing. People-Based Marketing, as the name suggests, is all about people. Your customers, their data, and their interaction with your brand determine your marketing as well as sales strategies.

Defined as a means to create a customer-centric, cohesive marketing system, People-Based Marketing revolves around customers and their real-time behavioral data. This data, combined with available first-party brand data, allows brands to target customers in real-time, across devices and channels, and in doing so, bring together all data regarding your customer’s journey. Thus, People-Based Marketing can help brands to not only unlock a source of revenue but also attain omnichannel business.

Also Read: Five Best Practices for Successful People-Based Marketing

According to BounceX, a successful People-Based Marketing strategy boils down to three key elements. These are:

• Identification
  Brands need to identify their customers and connect them correctly to their various devices. The goal here is to ensure persistent, cross-device recognition for a single view of the customer. This is necessary because your customers do not spend their online time on a single device. A typical customer navigates through various devices – desktop computer, smartphone, and tablet while looking at the same product you are offering. If this single customer journey is not tracked well, it could lead to incorrect assumptions about customer behavior, thereby causing inaccuracies in data which ultimately cause ill-designed marketing campaigns. To avoid that, brands must be able to identify their customer across channels and devices.
• Data
  Today, brands have a plethora of data on each of their customers; from purchase data to email engagement to device information. The identification-first approach for customer data gives brands an upper-hand of targeting them effectively. Not just historical data, brands should also refer to real-time behavioral data like their device, their interaction with your website, their carts as well as the products and categories they visited while browsing. Linking together these data points allows brands to get a singular view of the customer.
• Automation
  Instead of relying on cookie-based data, People-Based Marketing automation relies on people-based targeting. It helps brands unlock a singular view of the customer, anchoring all of the data to a single source. As a result, brands can automate and omnichannel marketing approach across all devices under a single cohesive marketing strategy.

Also Read: The People-Based Data Lake – A More Nimble Marketing Data Solution

Top 5 People-Based Marketing solutions

As mentioned earlier, one of the first People-Based Marketing initiatives came with the launch of Facebook Custom Audiences. It allowed advertisers to match their CRM data with Facebook user IDs to enhance targeting audiences. Now there are several brands offering People-Based Marketing solutions. These are the top 5 brands:

BounceX

BounceX offers a People-Based Marketing cloud and is the first new revenue channel with scale in ten years. Their proprietary identification technology allows marketers to convert unidentified, high-intent prospects into buyers by sending the right message at the right time on any device.

Acxiom

Acxiom enables People-Based Marketing through a simple, open approach to connecting systems and data that drives seamless customer experiences and higher ROI, through identity resolution that helps connect data to consumers in a privacy-compliant way.

AppNexus

AppNexus has partnered with LiveRamp, MediaMath and several others to create a people-based framework for advertisers who want to use programmatic ads outside Facebook and Google. The consortium allows AppNexus to make people-based marketing widely available within programmatic channels.

LiveIntent

LiveIntent knows that brands need to be present wherever their customers are present. They say that their people-based solutions empower brands to ensure they have a true relationship with their customers, and  helps you to “never treat your best customers like strangers and always treat strangers like your best customers.”

Targeto

Targeto makes it easy for you to manage marketing across a whole suite of different platforms – including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads – within a centralized interface. They say they help to “establish one-to-one, cross-channel interactions between marketers and consumers”, leading to increased customer loyalty, a better customer experience and improved ROI.

Like the nice barista at your neighborhood cafe who knows your name and the way you take your coffee, People-Based Marketing can allow brands to use technology to facilitate rich, personalized experiences for their customer. After all, we are all looking for brands who ‘get’ us.

Recommended Read: Three Steps Toward a People-Based Marketing Strategy