In order for your brand to provide that person with the experience you intended, they need to be found.
Marketing is not the name of the game. It's an experience. Give people the right experience and they will love you. If you consistently provide the right experience, they will be loyal to you.
We live in an increasingly digital-first world, but CPG companies and their affiliated media agencies have been too slow to evolve their audience targeting techniques. Additionally, the people making the most costly marketing decisions don't have access to the data they need to effectively reach the right customers. According to Gartner research, CMOs typically struggle with managing multiple data channels and prioritizing first-party data.
This is a huge problem considering that advertising and trade spending are the most important line items on a company's income statement. How and where these funds are spent has changed dramatically, raising complex questions about how to effectively raise and allocate them.
For marketers, an ever-evolving variety of platforms, from Facebook to Pinterest to YouTube to Snap to TikTok, offer countless ways to reach customers. Marketers know that each platform is unique, but the challenges are the same. It's about identifying and engaging the best consumers who see the connection between your brand's message and the desired action.
“People find advertising genuinely useful when it's relevant, informative, and entertaining. But that can't be the case if you don't know who your consumers are.” ,” says Paul Rooks, senior director of data-driven marketing at Keranova. “Target consumers are often defined at a superficial level. When this happens, the corresponding digital audience gets lost in translation and lacks proper integration and fidelity.”
Unsurprisingly, the intended message, even with deep pockets, is not reaching its valuable core consumers. We have the ability and data to treat our customers like people, not personalities. Why not?
History of media and consumer segmentation
The media model was built to run linear television. Today, with digital marketing, you have a better chance of finding the right target by sending exactly the right message, combined with more detailed data and precise targeting. However, the process never evolved to take advantage of this promise. Moreover, not enough marketers truly understand the process and its pitfalls.
When the world's first television advertisement aired in 1941, there were only a few commercial networks in the United States. In subsequent decades, marketers no longer needed to connect to or fully engage with data after creating a TV ad. The core consumer of women between the ages of 25 and 45 was understood and there were limited ways to reach them.
Media agencies often sit outside the mysterious black box of how FMCG partners create “targets” from syndicated consumer panels. As a 2023 KPMG report points out, companies in the consumer products industry have “historically been better at generating large amounts of data than extracting value from it. Data Science Teams often work in silos across different departments, preventing effective cross-functional coordination.”
Media partners who lack transparency over client data are given a condensed overview to work with. The nuances and uniqueness of the underlying consumer are flattened into a demographically segmented core target, causing a disconnection from a more complete picture of the actual human subject of insight curation. The media team then uses small-scale survey-based psychographic tools to create a profile of the demographic target and then send messages that will interest her. On the CPG company side, once the brief is created and handed off to ad creation, the marketing team often stops and pauses until marketing mix measurement begins.
While this model has worked well in the television industry for decades, the challenge of finding where people are moving and delivering relevant experiences, which requires first-party (1P) data, prime time television commercial.
the pendulum swung
BIA Advisory Services' 2024 U.S. Regional Advertising Forecast predicts that total advertising revenue across all media will reach $175.6 billion this year, with traditional media revenue at $91.5 billion and digital media revenue at $84.1 billion. I am. The 2024 divide will be influenced by the upcoming presidential election, but the shift to digital will continue to accelerate as user habits prioritize digital media over traditional. Statistica predicts that in 2025, the amount of time spent on traditional media per day will decrease to 258 minutes, compared to 478 minutes spent on digital media.
Social media and digital platforms provide visibility into valuable information about consumers' actual behavior, such as their favorite authors, charities, and restaurants. Digital platforms don't know if a person has bought a particular brand, but we learn what she likes and where to find people like her.if She can be found confidently from the beginning.
Conversely, retail media networks make decisions based on point-of-sale (POS) data, with visibility limited to purchasing behavior within their own four walls. What is not understood is what lies beyond their scope and the motivations and triggers for these purchases.
“A major barrier in marketers' quest to deliver meaningful experiences is incomplete data connectivity,” says Loukes. “There seems to be a lot of data in the room, but connecting purchase data to the motivations behind specific actions is critical to delivering the right experience at the right time.”
So, as a marketer, would you spend money going into a retail store and finding out who has bought your product in the past? Or finding someone who likes knitting or who owns a cat? Do you go to social media platforms for?
1P The power of data
Data that is a single snapshot at a single point in time has little value. Trends and correlated data are most important. Ideally, you would be able to classify and segment people based on their purchasing behavior. and their interests. Its vision is to unify data into a clear and comprehensive view, identify high-value customers based on affinity and purchase behavior, and effectively activate, message, and engage your most valuable customers. The goal is to do so.
“Data, whether it's attitudinal data, behavioral data, or purchasing data, is always a snapshot in time,” says marketing consultant and author Tracy Arrington. 101 things I learned at advertising school. “What's more powerful is trend data.”
Without the robust amount of data needed to build trend data and accordingly understand customer behavior over time, building a data team in CPG cannot be justified. Without a data team, you can't manage the amount of first-party (1P) data you collect directly from your customers. The technology required to track across platforms, such as Google Universe, Meta Universe, and activity within programmatic environments, is expensive and only available to companies with the biggest brands and budgets. But without it, you won't be able to personalize your messages to your customers.
Building a 1P data ecosystem can deepen your relationships with your customers. But once you have the data, you need to ask the right questions about it. Data in isolation isn't very useful, but if you can look at it and correlate it with other information, you can gain deep insights.
“It's important to understand not just how the platform works, but how the business works,” Arrington continues. “Media professionals tend to be hands-on with TikTok and Instagram, and we have to step back and look at how all our tools impact our customers. It's about improving the customer experience. We have to deliver excellence on the platform, but that performance has to be tied to excellence at the business level.”
Limited route to purchase displayed
No single piece of information will solve everything. The real power of big data lies in its ability to leverage data at the individual consumer level and cluster segments to find groups of people with similar behaviors. You can then compare segments demographically and behaviorally to identify high-value buyer segments and gain greater insight using attitudinal and qualitative data.
The KPIs used to measure success consider how the medium contributed to building lifetime value for the brand and fostering customer loyalty, as it relies solely on clicks as the only conversion metric. We need to evolve. Learning needs to be real-time so it can be applied quickly and effectively. That way, what you do next will be stronger, faster, and more relevant, resulting in a better customer experience.
“People don't seem to want to accept that not everything is traceable,” Arrington says. “That doesn't mean a particular effort isn't effective. If you're running TV ads and digital ads, and you're putting up billboards, you can't directly correlate sales from TV or billboards. That's OK. It's not a perfect system, and it never will be. There are very few cases where you see an ad and take immediate action on a big-ticket item. We don't make any reservations. We don't understand the path to purchase because we're fudging what happened during that time. We still can't measure what's going on in her head during that time.”
