Who are your customers? That should be a pretty easy question for most marketers. But many don’t really know who their customers are beyond their age, gender, and a few other demographics.
It’s time we acknowledge that our customers are people, both complex and unpredictable. If we, as marketers, want to understand our customers in this context–that is, as people–we need to change the way we gather and store information about them. That means using all of our marketing channels to develop a more dynamic persona that fully represents a person’s changing interests.
Take advertising, for example. Ad campaigns offer a unique opportunity to extract customer insight while accomplishing the core goal of reaching and persuading audiences. Real-time advertising uniquely recognizes what customers are paying attention to, delivers advertising targeted to those interests, and reveals the unique relationship between audience interest and advertising volume and effectiveness. Brands that use advertising to this end position create a visible presence around the trends and topics that are clearly important to that audience. Perhaps more importantly, they learn things about their audience they may not have learned anywhere else.
Consider the following example: A diet products company runs an ad campaign that includes a real-time media component. That solution discovers what the company’s target audience is talking about at various different times, and then places the brand’s ads next to those trending topics. As a result, the brand learns that its target audience responds very positively to advertising targeted around specific events–in this case, going on vacation. In fact, when audiences talk about vacation topics, the brand’s ads notably outperform other health-related contextual placements. Here’s the key: Going on vacation was not content the brand had planned to run its campaign against. The vacation trend purely emerged from the process of running the campaign–a completely new insight based on closely monitoring what its audience was talking about and then running advertising against it.
The lesson for marketers is that the right kind of advertising insights will expand your audience segmentation understanding. These insights will reveal new segments not based on traditional demographics or creatively developed personas, but rather on real-time trends. And the insights will help match that dynamic persona to a desired audience based on advertising performance data. In other words, real-time insights will produce data-driven audience segmentations for right now.
By: Adam Kapel | Taykey SVP of Marketing Insights
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