24 Feb Signal-Loss: The Signals Aren’t Gone If You Know How To Listen
Meta: Bridge the gap between digital and offline insights and create captivating storytelling that resonates with your audience to stop signal-loss.
Each of us creates a digital sound. Did you know that? Your age, gender, your interactions – every Like, every Share, every Add to Cart, every Wish List – you get the idea – create these data points. And each data point clashes with the next. Each bouncing off another. This cacophony of sounds creates your digital self.
As marketers in the digital age, we’ve been accustomed to and, maybe even spoiled a bit, when it comes to targeting the specific sound from the specific audience on behalf of our clients.
But it’s been all good, right? The customers find the product they want. The client is happy because sales are up. And the marketers look like geniuses. Everybody wins.
Well…not so fast. Turns out, the customers weren’t so happy. Especially when customers found out how eerily similar their digital selves sounded to their real, un-Matrixed self. Collectively we began to ask, “Is collecting all of that data on people a good thing?” And at the end of the day, a lot of us agreed that things got a little out of hand with the collecting data thing. So, customers started turning toward more private services. Big Tech lost market share. So, finally they responded. Apple cracked down; Google followed suit. Here we are about ready to say good-bye to 3rd party cookies on Chrome. Facebook is taking measures.
Customers complain even more about ads, and now they’re being shown less relevant ads – which frightens and confuses them more [joking…kinda]. Clients are getting frustrated because digital returns aren’t at the highwater mark. And the marketers look like idiots.
This is signal loss. And yes, as a marketer, it sucks.
It’s not that all the sound from our digital customers is gone, it’s just a bit muffled here and there. See, marketers have been so wrapped up in the granularity and accuracy of digital targeting, they totally forgot how to listen for other things. Clients need their agencies to reliably target their customer base with a high degree of accuracy.
Let’s Talk…Offline (Offline Data Resurgence):
Between the rising cost of digital, private data concerns, and the need for accurate customer data, we’ve found that tuning into the oldies is always a good idea once in a while.
That’s right, good old fashioned:
- Transactional Data – in-store purchases, customer loyalty data, etc.
- Behavioral Data – attendance at events, physical product usage, interactions with offline advertising
- Demographic Data – age, gender, location, income
- Psychographic Data – political and/or religious affiliation, lifestyle choices
We’ve been around the block a few times and know how to leverage that sweet, wholesome offline data to enhance our digital targeting. It’s just one way we’re able to keep finding those right signals.
I Have the POWER! (Harnessing the Power Second-Party Purchase Data):
Let’s say you’re a company. And you’ve collected information about your customers. You then sell that information to another company. That’s second party data. Why is it important? Because it’s accurate and helps us in a big way.
Here’s how:
- Behavioral Targeting – We can use this to target audiences who have “purchased similar items in the past” or have “had similar interests in the past,” great for CTV campaigns because there’s a decent chance you’re hitting more than one customer.
- Lookalike Targeting – Second party data is essential in creating a robust and healthy lookalike audience.
- Email Segmentation – Stick with us on this one. Second-party data is used to create a segmented list. You can then personalize those emails within those segments for that oh-so-personalized feel.
- Experiential Targeting – we can use second-party data to make product recommendations on their website.
An agency doesn’t just need to understand their clients, an agency needs to understand the client’s customers as well. Second-party data helps us find those signals that are a little less prominent but are no less important than first-party data.
Who’s On First? (Optimizing First-Party Data Capabilities):
Goody-bye third-party cookies hello….wait, what comes after third-party cookies? Are fourth-party muffins not a thing anymore? Truth is, we’ve been learning how to deal with a cookie-less marketing landscape for quite a while now. Long enough to know that the landscape is always changing.
Cookies are gone and, while we’re not quite sure what’s on the horizon, we do know what has been working. Organizing and optimizing your first-party data capabilities is as essential now as it ever has been. We know how to use your data to expand your reach and reach new customers just through your own data.
…But Do They Match Though? (Deterministic Matching Techniques):
The best customer journeys are seamless and create lifetime customers. The Holy Grail of customer journeys, the seamless customer journey, is one that combines a multichannel digital campaign with a multichannel traditional campaign, using both digital and offline tactics in what’s called deterministic matching techniques. Ooof that’s some industry jargon.
Essentially, what we at RI do is help improve customer identification, consolidate customer profiles, apply cross-channel attribution, improve customer engagement, and a few other things to ensure that we have 1-to-1 targeting across display, native, video, connected TV/over-the-top, and audio channels. It means our clients advertising budgets have a higher return on ad spend while reaching a definite and relevant audience.
Can We Please Acknowledge Creative? (Creating Compelling Creative)
Ok, so relying on hyper-targeted ads, constantly tracking campaigns, optimizing ads, and creating real-time, interactive campaign dashboards for our clients is extremely important, but we also want to tell our client’s story. Afterall, that’s what we are, storytellers. And to tell a good story, we need strong, compelling creative that speaks our clients’ message to their customers. People react at an emotional level to powerful creative. That’s what we do. Because we know how to listen and what we’re listening for, our award-winning creative speaks to our clients’ audience in a way that cuts through the other noise.
There’s a lot in this blogpost, we get it. That’s why we’re here to help you through it. Your digital self, your customers’ digital selves, they’re still making noise – jamming out like there’s no tomorrow so long as they’re smashing that Like button and not forgetting to Subscribe. We’re here to listen to you. To tell your story. We’re also here to listen to your customers and learn about them. And we know how to cut through the signal-loss, so the right person hears your story at the right time. To learn more, contact us today.