In today’s marketing world, to gain the attention of your audience, your strategic approach needs to be able to change on a dime. Each day trends shift, and new technologies are introduced, and if you don’t stay on top of it all, you may find yourself dishing out ads straight into the virtual spam bin. Now more than ever, it’s important to understand your customers, what they want, and how to keep them interested—especially since their attention span might only last the length of a Tik Tok video.
People-Based Marketing – What to Know
Putting a Virtual Face to Your Customer
All the moving parts of this digital world we live in make it hard to pin down who exactly your user is. A few years ago, you were only able to see that someone liked your Facebook post, or visited your website, but it was difficult to connect the two actions to one unique user. Without the specifics, we were left to work with audience types, a sea of anonymous faces that shared general interests or geographic location. Luckily, today’s advancements in identity resolution have made identifying individuals within your audience more attainable than ever.
Once you know who your user is, it’s time to leverage the power of people-based marketing.
What is People-Based Marketing?
People-based marketing targets individuals instead of groups or audiences and allows you to track and target those individuals across multiple devices. Now instead of someone seeing your ad only when browsing the internet on their desktop, they’ll also see your brand on their mobile phone, streaming tv service, tablet, and streaming radio services. This maximizes your exposure to your customers and keeps you top of mind when they’re at a point of purchase.
How Does it Work?
While this may sound pretty magical, connecting all this information is actually like playing a game of Who Am I? Once you answer a few questions, you’ll be able to build out a robust profile for each customer.
First, you need to start out with first-person data, information that is verified directly by the user. This could be an email address that they use to sign up for a Facebook account on their desktop that matches an existing email address that is in your CRM. Then you can start using that first-person data to link that customer across different accounts and devices. For example, if that same user uses their Facebook login to register for a Spotify account using their mobile device, then you can attribute two additional data points to their profile. If their mobile device has location settings turned on, you can see where they’re located and spend most of their time.
Once you start mapping your customer, you’ll see that the information gathered is always in flux. They may get a new phone, change addresses, or go on a social hiatus. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to see that the collection and analysis of all this data requires a highly intelligent data management platform, also known as a DMP. Digiday describes DMPs as “platforms that allow marketers to gather, analyze, manipulate, and update the sets of data they collect about prospective consumers. Without a DMP capable of managing large quantities of frequently changing and updating data, it would be impossible to create the persistent IDs that power people-based campaigns.” Once you have a DMP in place, you can start putting a virtual face to your customer base and target individuals on a whole new level.
Leveraging the Power of the People
Once you have a customer profile built out, you now have the power to give them what they want at the right time. Using a curated people-based marketing campaign, you can target based on their behaviors, interests, and where they are in the buyer’s journey. You can extend your reach across different platforms and devices, and track it all in one centralized space. That’s pretty powerful stuff if you ask us.
Ready to leverage the power of people-based marketing in your hospitality business strategy? Contact us to learn more about how to identify your customers and create the right messaging at the right time.