An audience management strategy that puts customers first begins from the outside-in. You must define your prospective audiences, and their journeys, rather than try only to solve a specific marketing challenge or leverage a specific customer data management channel (or tool) in which you may already have invested.
Once you have insight into your customers' journey, that person’s preferred path to purchase (preferred channels, platforms, and devices), you will be ready to build the audience management framework around customer-centric insights. Let’s dive in!
Building the Framework
Armed with true customer journey insight, you’re now ready to build a much more compelling audience management strategy based on where your customers are, and the messages they will be most receptive to. Your multi-channel, or omni-channel campaign design helps define exactly which messages will go to which segment, and on which channel and schedule.
This strategy will include both “first-party known data applications” that are needed to leverage your CDP + CRM + martech infrastructure, as well as “third-party unknown data applications” that are needed to leverage DMP + programmatic infrastructure. While both sets of applications can help with your acquisition goals, first-party data is essential for retention and loyalty. It’s important to note that while the technology and enablers for each of the above use-cases may be different, you need a singular, overarching, strategic approach to customer-centric audience management.
To sum it up, your customer-centric audience management strategy, paired with a new operational approach, can help drive optimal marketing and campaign outcomes in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.
It is important to also define the following:
●Role of campaign managers, agencies, and other stakeholders;
● Audience management processes: The goal of audience platforms is to enable cross-channel activation, therefore, some internal processes might need to be modified to accomplish these goals. It is also useful to identify gaps in current audience management workflows and strategies;
●Capabilities and skills needed to maintain an effective audience management function;
●The technology and tools you need to execute and support the strategy;
●The right partner to help build and execute a customer-centric, scalable audience management strategy and help you move to the next level of audience management maturity.
Want to learn more about audience management? Check out our latest report here.
