How Setting Fundamental Audience-Building Techniques Will Help Marketers Get a Leg up in Their Targeting Strategies

Being complacent in business has never been beneficial, but when considering this through the lens of the rapidly-changing data landscape, complacency is going to cost your company now more than ever. The marketing ecosystem is transforming faster every day, and advertisers are always searching for the next big trend to get a leg up in their targeting strategies. For smart marketers, it’s all about combining many different types of data collection to establish a comprehensive, audience-building methodology.

Despite using traditional demographic and behavioral data attributes at the individual level, you also want to provide detailed insights on consumers as real people. Layering on extremely fine data points of deterministic, unique identifiers completes an overarching view of an individual from a marketing standpoint. It also gives marketers the ability to know what people are doing online and on mobile, enabling advertisers to have greater confidence that they are actively targeting the people they know are interested in what they’re offering.

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Building Data Differentiators

Having this comprehensive view of the targeted individual enables advertisers to choose between broad or granular audiences based on what they’re trying to achieve, not based on what they don’t know about the person—a luxury that’s only now being fully realized. This, above all else, is paramount.

The demographics that advertisers use to target audiences haven’t changed—age, gender, income and beyond are still viable categories. What’s changed is the wide range of tailor-made attributes that fill out the methodology. Advertisers won’t go out and try to collect this highly valuable information from thousands upon thousands of sources themselves. They need companies that pride themselves on using data as a major differentiator.

Do the legwork and you’ll easily integrate and embed with first-party data sources to help influence their decisions on who to target.

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Finding the Mobile Bullseye

Better yet would be to have a direct view into what people are consuming on their devices— kind of like web cookies, which advertisers love. But cookies are an extremely small piece of data that only gives surface-level insight into a person’s browsing habits. The other problem is they don’t work within mobile apps, meaning marketers can’t optimize efforts or understand a person’s mobile app experiences from that perspective.

People are always on their phones, tablets or devices, so of course, mobile is the most widely used consumer channel. With 86 percent of a person’s mobile time spent on apps, it’s where consumers are and where marketers want to be. It’s no surprise that companies must now consider their mobile strategy first. But how they manage that strategy is the key. Incorporating mobile information like app usage and location into traditional demographics and interest data actually drives greater engagement at a lower media cost. Simply put, it eliminates ad waste through avoiding targeting uninterested people. The real advantage is now you know who that person is because of the deterministic nature of device collection.

Marketers won’t necessarily continue to refine their audience. What they will do is have greater confidence in the fact that the people you are including in an audience have the best chance to engage, click, buy and more. The more you know about a person, the more confidence you can have if they have a higher potential to be interested. The complete view we have of an individual allows you to choose the fuel you’re putting into your marketing engine.

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