In order to be effective in your marketing, it’s important to understand your customers. However, this can be difficult when you have different data sets in different channels. Most digital marketing data today is 1st party data that is native to that channel. This is because the old intrusive technology 3rd party cookies are going away. This makes it harder to transfer data between domains and match your customers for instance to Facebooks users.
So what do you need to do when the matching gets harder to do?
1. Use data that is comparable with your customer data in order to better understand them.
2. Work with different data sets in different channels to get a holistic view of your customer.
3. Use data to segment your market and target your advertising.
4. Understand what data is available to you and how you can use it to improve your marketing efforts.
If you want to be more effective in your marketing, it’s important to understand your customers. Market research and surveys can give you a general idea of what the market looks like, but you need to go beyond that and get closer to the data that actually matters – the data that is relevant to your customers.
Media selection, search words, Facebook look-a-likes and other 3rd party audience providers can all help you operationalise your strategies, but it’s important to make sure that the data you’re using is actionable. Try to create insights that are based on your own marketing data, rather than on algorithms or targeting options that you don’t fully understand.
It’s also important to understand that different channels often have different KPIs. The data that one channel reports may not be directly comparable to the data from another channel. So when you’re trying to follow up on your marketing strategies, focus on the data that is most relevant to your goals. By doing this, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions and achieve better results.
Fast & Slow Data
When it comes to data, there are two main types: fast data and slow data. Fast data is generally the more directly actionable, as it’s based on things like conversions and search activity. Slow data, on the other hand, is demographic information that doesn’t change as often but can still be a relevant targeting option for marketing.
FAST
- Re-targeting data – conversion focus, event-based (visits, clicks, etc.)
- Search data – contextual and activity based data (ad clicks, context)
- Interests data – currently reading a topic (often linked to cookies)
SLOW
- Demographical data, gender/age – seldom changed but relevant for some products
- Socio-economical data – seldom changed, can be challenging to keep updated
- Lifestyle data – advanced data combinations for consumer groups, often geographically linked.
