In a nutshell: Regain power from digital vendors, their fancy words, and stock imagery with data. Data is the great equalizer if you know how to read the tea leaves. In this article, we’ll explore a few ways you can source and utilize some of the best data out there—your own.
The digital marketing industry is full of catchy phrases, jargon, empty promises, and an overwhelming amount of confusion. Demand-side platforms, boutique vendors, data partners, agencies, internal stakeholders … they’re all in the ear of the digital marketer, many with compelling value propositions, PowerPoint presentations, and equally “brilliant” ideas. Everyone has “the best” way they can reach your customers online; it is always proprietary, and it will cost you nothing!
To regain the power from vendors, their fancy words, and stock imagery, we recommend you arm yourself with data. Data is the great equalizer if you know how to read the tea leaves. In this article, we’ll explore a few ways you can source and utilize some of the best data out there—your own. An educated business owner is an empowered consumer, driving the conversation and delivering measurable results.
Tip 1: Get Informed for Free
If you don’t have Google Analytics or its equivalent running on your website, you can stop reading here and investigate activating that immediately. Assuming you do have GA running and collecting data, you have an excellent source of first-party data.
We can use this data to identify content online that we want to put ads on. If you were given an opportunity to sponsor a dog rescue website, would knowing that 45% of your website visitors were avid pet lovers help you decide whether to do it? If you knew 30% of your website visitors were in the market to buy a new (versus used) sauna and which model they liked, could you craft a message to get them into your showroom?
(Struggling with the switch to GA4 from Universal Analytics? Check out our blog series)
Tip 2: Use Your CRM Data
Google Analytics data can be used in several ways but will always be general; it won’t tell you who the people are. Rather than rely on online or offline signals to find your customers, you can tell the internet who they are. If you are lucky enough to have robust CRM data, we recommend you leverage it in a number of different ways.
Convert Data Into Digital IDs to Target Online
Vendors like LiveRamp take your CRM data, match it to digital identifiers, and generate a list of privacy-safe IDs you can serve ads to. Like we noted above, instead of targeting “pet lovers” generically, we can target your customers in particular.
Segment Audiences
Not all customers are the same and you shouldn’t use the same digital marketing tactics, or creative, to reach them all. Divide your CRM data into groups that make sense for your brand, such as primary shoppers, secondary shoppers, seasonal shoppers, etc.
Find Their Friends
Increase the scale and reach of your custom first-party audiences by using their characteristics to build lookalike audiences. For example, you know “John Smith” is your best customer, so let’s find more people that have the same behaviors and patterns as John—they could be your next, best customer!
Tip 3: Don’t Overthink It
The temptation to chase the rabbit too far is great with digital marketing. After all, if you know your best prospect is a 35-year-old woman who drives a Jeep, loves pets, rides a skateboard, and collects bunny slippers on weekends, it stands to reason you just need to find more of her and success will be unavoidable, right? How many of those people even exist? And did I really weave two Oryctolagus uses in this article?
There are instances, such as retargeting, where hyper-targeted audiences can make sense, but, in general, segmenting your CRM data into a half dozen groups should be more than sufficient.
Whether you’re using Google Analytics data, CRM data, other first-party data, or third-party audience segments, you can reduce waste and both increase and directly measure results. As a wise man once said, an educated business owner is an empowered consumer, driving the conversation and delivering measurable results.
Conclusion
No matter what you’ve heard about changes to data and privacy in the digital world, there’s a vast amount of data already available to you that enables you to reach your customers. You can empower yourself or, if you want more guidance, we can help. Just reach out to us and let us know.
