According to the Harvard Business Review, the four Ps of traditional marketing (price, placement, promotion, and product) needs to be shaken up and contextualised according to the particular needs, wants and circumstances of your customers.
Data-first marketing, or data-driven marketing strategy, makes calculated marketing decisions that can optimise campaigns to customer data. Marketers need to use reliable and accurate customer data to identify customer profiles better and enhance customer segmentation by making use of diverse data available, usually using marketing data management platforms.
Behavioural marketing is not new. Today’s customers expect experiences that are tailored to their interests. And they are very quick to unfollow the brand if the communication is not relevant and engaging. Changes in data legislation, device tracking and similar, however, have changed the way in which advertisers must focus their behavioural marketing initiatives.
Many of the personalisation strategies of the 2015-2020 period were based on cookie-based data and acquired third-party data sets. While these methods enabled anonymous user-targeting at scale, updates to tracking regulations, as well as consumers’ general annoyance at being advertised to directly by brands they have not heard of, are changing these strategies.
Today, data-driven personalisation efforts must extend beyond top-of-funnel ad targeting to include contextual customer experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle, delivered across channels. To successfully deliver these contextual experiences to customers, it’s important to be able to access first-party customer data and activate it in real-time.
An important subject of personalisation that is not talked about enough in this region is dynamic landing pages. The idea is that, instead of arriving on a blanket landing page, a dynamic landing page would essentially be customised to highlight content more relevant to a user. When executed well, these pages have the potential to increase conversion rates. They speak directly to each individual’s specific needs, but also give them a reason to stay on your site and take the desired action.
If 500 different people go to Amazon.com, they each find a different version of the home page. How come? It’s personalised. As we know, Amazon does things well. Content personalisation makes money as higher relevancy leads to higher revenue.
According to Forrester research, 61 per cent of consumers said they are unlikely to return to a website that does not provide a satisfactory customer experience. This puts unprecedented pressure on brands to know what consumers want and to be able to deliver on those desires in effective ways, and in real-time. A dynamic landing page is one way of answering that.
With behavioural targeting we need to look at several different sources of data:
Website engagement: What are people looking at and clicking on your site?
Campaign engagement: How are users engaging and interacting with your ads?
Purchase behaviour: What items did someone purchase or add to their cart?
App engagement: What actions have people taken (or not taken) in your app?
This is where a customer data platform (CDP) comes into play. It helps to aggregate and make sense of our customer data through the key five functions:
Data collection: The ability to ingest first-party, individual-level customer data from multiple sources via application programming interface (API) connections and software development kits (SDKs), and store that data in a usable format.
Data governance: The ability to granularly enforce which events get passed on to each system, and process data subject requests.
Data quality protection and profile unification: The ability to monitor data accuracy and deduplication, and to unify events and attributes to profiles at the individual level.
Segmentation: It enables business users to build and manage audience segments.
Activation: The ability to send audience segments to external tools and systems.
By ingesting data from across channels into one system, using it to build audience segments and activating it across downstream tools, CDPs have become the critical piece of growth that makes it possible to deliver behavioural marketing initiatives at scale. They also, most importantly, make it easy for business teams to access the data.
Recently, we have seen more and more brands and businesses that integrate the request for CDP in their media agencies’ briefs. This is a very exciting time for all agencies that get to work on these types of clients. It allows data activation across media channels in a unified way, backed up by personally identifiable information from different marketing sources.
Behavioural marketing and data-driven personalisation are musts for any business. The exciting promise of personalisation may not be here yet (at least not at scale), but it’s not far off. We need to work closely with our client brands to locate the right data. It is everywhere, but we need to make a joint decision on what data will be the most beneficial for data-driven marketing. We also need to learn how to interpret it to get insights – finding relevant information is merely the first step.
However, with all the above, we need to keep in mind that there is evidence that using online ‘surveillance’ to sell products can lead to a consumer backlash. With personalised ads, there’s a fine line between creepy and delightful. Brands have to work on a fine balance, making sure they don’t take personalisation too far.
