People-Based Marketing on the Rise

The strategic benefits of people-based marketing have been regularly touted over the last few years by various martech vendors and big-name brands. But what is people-based marketing? And where does it fit in with the myriad marketing approaches (and buzzwords) that exist in the field of data-driven marketing?

People-based marketing utilizes technology to accurately track an individual’s behavior across different channels. No matter what device they use, a marketer can deliver targeted ads, or marketing messages, based on the sum of their omni-channel actions.

Alternatively, traditional ‘siloed’ analytics – whether device or platform specific – can confuse a person’s cross-channel journey for the actions of separate individuals. The end result being an incomplete or inaccurate picture of the customer.

People-based marketing helps to identify and better understand the individual behind the data. Its origins hark back to 2013 when Facebook acquired the ad server, Atlas, to bring the power of Facebook advertising to the wider internet. Facebook’s head of advertising technology, David Jakubowski, heralded this as the arrival of ‘people-based marketing’ in which data could become truly representative of an individual’s behavior across different devices.

Solving the Cookie’s Shortcomings

Cookies have been a data driven staple for many years. Yet their limitations are well known: they are device and browser specific. With the average digital consumer owning an average 3.2 connected devices (such as desktop, tablet, mobile and TVs), cookies can provide only a limited understanding of a consumer’s behavior. They can also be misleading: people share devices and remove temporary internet files.

While cookies themselves work well enough as a singular entity, the problem remains drawing the line to associate the cookie-driven ad with the individual to whom it is being served. The ability to draw that line has always been important; after all, marketers have always striven to reach the right individual with the right ad, but current and looming privacy regulations raise the stakes for digital advertisers to ensure they’re not messaging those who have opted-out (or provided implicit consent).

Much better to combine cookies with context and behavior-based insights. It’s about reading a consumer’s digital body language and identifying who they are. To do this, you need to pull together a range of data, including: behavioral, demographic, purchase, mobile, and social data. The end result is a multi-layered profile.

3 Core Elements to People-Based Marketing

Identification: Marketers need to correctly identify customers and connect them to their various devices. As a result, brands get an accurate single view of the customer. This provides the basis for targeted and timely marketing efforts better geared to the particular needs and desires of the individual.

Data: Marketers must be able to link together different data streams. While cookies remain part of the mix, it also includes behavioral metrics such as interactions with your website (products viewed, page dwell time, etc.) as well as social media analytics and more.

Automation: Pulling together all the data to a single source means that individuals can be targeted via automated omnichannel marketing campaigns. Identifying the individual user, unlocks the door to personalization.

Unlocking the Power of Personalization

A survey by Cloud IQ found that 64% of respondents now expect an individualized experience, while 83% think of an individualized experience as important. There are four key things that customers want from personalized marketing:

? relevant offers/content

? to be remembered

? to feel listened to and understood

? to be in control

According to research by BounceX almost two fifths (37%) of consumers would be more likely to make a purchase if they received a personalized notification about a product they have already looked at online. While over a quarter (28%) find onsite overlays helpful, as long as they are personal and enhance their user experience.

This reiterates the importance of serving customers with the right message at the right time:

“By enabling retailers to recognize site visitors on a unique basis, they have greater clarity of where each individual customer is on their individual buying journey, which allows them to trigger relevant emails or overlays to deliver the online personalization that customers now both demand and expect.” said Robert Massa, General Manager of BounceX EMEA.

However, it pays to beware of being too pushy, as the same study reveals that 57% of shoppers say they receive marketing messages too frequently.

3 Examples of Personalization-in-Action

Helpful recommendations: Consumers are happy to be marketed to, if they find it relevant or useful. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm is a prime example. Based on search history, purchase history and many other data points, Amazon identifies an individual’s tastes and provides bespoke recommendations which perfectly match. It’s upselling but without annoying the customer.

Improved calls-to-action: Instead of showing the same content to each visitor, create a different version depending on who the visitor is. ‘Calls-to-action‘ (CTA) are a prime example. Intuit Quickbase uses Hubspot so that if a user has already acted upon a CTA, such as a ‘download report’ message; it will then give that user a different CTA next time. Naturally, it will take the customer on the logical next step in the sales funnel.

Persuasive presentations: Netflix’s recommendation system takes things to the next level in that it presents recommendations differently depending on your user profile. For example, if you’ve previously watched films starring Tom Hardy, then a recommendation for the film ‘Dunkirk’ will place his picture more prominently.

From Data Streams to Human Beings

People-based marketing enables brands to more effectively engage with consumers and provide more personalized marketing. Every company and industry has its own strategic challenges to address, but all will benefit from taking a more customer-centric view underpinned by a cohesive marketing system which transforms data into people.

Given a choice between serving data streams and serving human beings, what do you think will work best?

Data Services, Inc. provides the contact data management technology and services you need to connect silos and create a normalized, complete data warehouse containing validated contact data purposed for your data-driven marketing goals.