In the battle for customer acquisition, data plays an important role in marketing strategy, with a desired product and excellent creativity. There is also the challenge of reaching a target audience where they spend most of their time, which is happening today in mobile applications and on social networks.
When we look at Google, Facebook and Amazon from the perspective of an advertiser, we see that they use a lot more data for their own benefit than what they make available for the segmentation of the audience.
Amazon's data has always been a walled garden. Their incredibly deep historical data on behaviors and patterns of purchase gives them a considerable advantage, leading to what many claim are fierce product decisions and highly targeted product recommendations.
I expect Facebook to become more and more of an enclosed garden after overexposure and inefficient monitoring of third-party data use. By closing their Partner Category program, they are reinforcing to their advertisers that Facebook's audience data is the primary source of campaign segmentation.
How to cope in such an environment?
Although many data sources are available for targeting on most digital properties, one of the most effective ways that brands can target is to integrate their existing data sets into social media. This often provides a competitive advantage over the "walled gardens" of key technology players, as your own data is usually much more relevant to your marketing efforts.
The top four sites – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat – offer advertisers the ability to create custom audiences using their own data and, in some cases, to use third-party data sets.
The workflow is similar at all sites:
- Prepare your data.
- Download it.
- Social media sites hack and unidentify data.
- Your data is then mapped to the social media site's user base.
- Your custom audience is created.
- And your original data file is deleted.
Typically, the most commonly used data sets for comparison are the email addresses, identifiers / tags provided by the social media sites themselves, and mobile advertising identifiers. Most sites require a minimum of 1,000 records to create a personalized audience. This is for privacy reasons (to ensure that the data is aggregated and that no individual has been identified), and to ensure that the segment is large enough to deliver properly.
The benefits of using your own data
The ability to create custom audiences on social media allows advertisers to reframe many of their existing marketing tactics. They can encourage repeat visits, in-store or online, from existing customers, or try to win shoppers from competitive locations.
Non-physical brands seeking to address consumers directly can also use custom audiences to access their social media market. Most sites also allow advertisers to create "look-alike" audiences to help increase the scale of the campaign. They search for the common features of the audience you have downloaded and find similar consumers for your campaign.
One last example of how you can use your own data is to stimulate the acquisition of mobile applications. Building a custom audience from existing customers creates a segment with a much higher propensity to download and use a mobile application, especially when it is associated with appropriate incentives.
A key element of these strategies has always been, and will continue to be, to ensure that the data sets you use have opted for marketing communication and advertising. Expect to see more transparency required from the end user, especially as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect next month.
In addition to being able to reach a relevant audience, bringing your own data to a social media site can also improve performance and reduce costs. Cost savings are more relevant – in Facebook jargon, the relevancy score is higher – which can result in lower costs per click as you can potentially win the auction for a higher price. impression given at a lower price.
The brands, advertisers, and agencies they work with were hungry for good data to help them reach the holy trinity of the right time, the right place, and the right person. The use of their own data sets will become an increasingly important tactic for the overall customer acquisition strategy by the distributor to achieve this goal.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. The authors of the staff are listed here.
About the author
Brian Handly, CEO of Reveal Mobile, has over 20 years of experience in technical, operational and executive management, including 18 years in the advertising technology field. Brian was co-founder and CEO of Accipiter, acquired by Atlas in December 2006, followed by Microsoft's acquisition of Atlas in 2007 for $ 6.1 billion. Prior to their recent acquisition, Handly served on the WebAssign board of directors and is currently serving as an operational partner of Frontier Capital. Brian also has extensive experience as an angel investor and is an active advisor to several technology companies in North Carolina.