Editor’s Note: This guest post was contributed by Leah Retta, Content Strategy Associate at Social Code.
Advertisers in 2018 are either digital-first or heavily investing in their digital presence. Fortune 500 brands market themselves across both traditional and digital channels, while challenger brands build their brand identity across the leading digital channels that allow them to scale quickly and measure results effectively. Digital platforms connect brands directly to users, and marketers are embracing what we call a “people-based marketing” approach to take their digital strategy to the next level.
What is People-Based Marketing?
People-based marketing combines first-party data with second and third-party data, such as social platform behavioral data, psychographic data and information from partners like credit card companies. The marrying of these data inputs allows advertisers to target real individuals — not devices — and tap into the characteristics associated with their user profiles in order to deliver personalized messaging.
People-based marketing ensures that brands are able to connect online touchpoints with user action both online and in-store. Previously consumers were used to mass messaging on traditional channels. Now they want an advertising experience that is personalized, less disruptive, and less repetitive as they spend time on multiple devices.
Marketers now have the ability to reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message. If a prospective lead is exposed to a brand’s ad on a mobile app and visits their website on their laptop two days later, marketers using a people-based marketing approach are able to attribute these actions to a single individual rather than register them as separate touchpoints.
This insight indicates the individual has a strong potential to convert, allowing your brand to design more effective and personalized messaging as you strive to push your most valuable audiences down the conversion funnel. As brands continue to demand more transparency and better measurement, people-based marketing will provide them with the assurance that their ad dollars are being spent properly, safely, and effectively.
The Role of Data
People-based marketing gives brands the ability to use data to interact with consumers in a more personalized manner. Before people-based marketing, advertisers relied on cookie-based models. Cookie-based marketing is far less robust and is wholly reliant on data stored on a single device. According to Pew, approximately 77 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and the average U.S. household has access to more than three devices. In order to gain a clear picture of what your target audience looks like, you must be able to understand their entire journey across devices.
Data plays an irreplaceable role in successful digital advertising. Whether data is first-party, CRM, or location-based, it helps marketers inform their messaging, refine their targeting strategy, and design their creative. Brands can understand who their audiences are and what they want their digital experience to look and feel like, allowing them to drive business results by effectively reaching qualified leads, especially as attention becomes more fragmented online.
Using data to refine acquisition strategy leads to positive engagement and interactions with your business. Data also allows advertisers to improve their attribution modeling, which is an ongoing industry pain point. When there’s an understanding of who you are reaching, multiple touchpoints can be attributed to a single user. This gives you the opportunity to ensure your marketing strategy is driving your brand’s objectives.
People-Based Marketing and LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great example of a leading digital platform that embraces people-based marketing. LinkedIn has created unique tools for marketers that enable them to harness the power of both LinkedIn data and first-party data to reach consumers. Matched Audiences is a LinkedIn targeting tools that gives advertisers the ability to combine LinkedIn’s professional data with a brand’s owned first-party data.
With Matched Audiences, marketers have the opportunity to tap into data that allows them to engage their most valuable audiences. Matched Audiences allows marketers to focus on audiences that will drive business results and revenue.
One of the specific capabilities of LinkedIn Matched Audiences is Contact Targeting. With Contact Targeting, you have a secure way to upload first-party .CSV files to LinkedIn or one of its partner contact management platforms, such as Marketo or Liveramp. After uploading their contacts, marketers can track prospects, leads, customers, and past customers to customize your marketing strategy. With Contact Targeting, you have the chance to follow contacts along their consumer journey to inform how to strategically drive sales and follow strong leads.
Recently, a major financial services brand wanted to use LinkedIn to drive registrations for access to its thought leadership content and webinars. SocialCode used Linkedin’s Matched Audiences capabilities as well as LinkedIn Sponsored Content to reach a qualified audience. SocialCode used the brand’s CRM list, driving a 50 percent match rate, while incorporating native audiences to bolster the audience size. This resulted in a 19x more efficient cost-per-registration rate and 2.2x higher click-through-rate than native audiences.
At SocialCode, we believe in people-based marketing, because it strikes a perfect balance between scale and accountability — while simultaneously driving business goals. People-based marketing gives advertisers the ability to not only effectively reach the right consumers at the right time, but also properly measure the impact of their advertising campaigns.
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