Not enough companies are leveraging one of their greatest assets — their marketing database. The addressable audience mart is an offshoot of our traditional marketing database. As we think about industry verticals such as Financial Services and Insurance, we need to consider how many of the actual purchases are happening offline.
While our digital media programs are driving and measuring conversion on things like quotes, applications, and downloading of coupons, we don’t actually have a customer until the physical sale happens (e.g., the insurance policy or the funding of a bank account). Additionally, we want to understand how to retain that customer and drive up lifetime value.
For banking, we want to monitor how they are transacting with us, if they are keeping a high balance and using their debit card regularly. For insurance, we want to know if they have kept their policy payments up to date and when it expires. How do we retain these customers? This type of valuable information allows us to manage addressable digital targeting, amplifying consideration and increasing high value sales. We can typically find these customer profiles in any robust marketing database, as well as third-party lists of target profiles ripe for purchasing our products.
This forces us to start considering how to leverage first and third-party data from the marketing database to drive more insights into addressable audiences. We can segment these potential audiences into the following categories:- First-party, or customer, offline data onboarded to various online platforms
- First-party, or customer, offline data onboarded and then modeled with online data for targeting look-a-likes
- Third-party, or prospect, offline data onboarded to various online platforms
- Third-party, or prospect, offline data onboarded and then modeled with online data for targeting look-a-likes
Unfortunately, in today’s environment these audiences need to be loaded to multiple cookie and people-based platforms to drive reach. Tracking and measuring these audiences in a customer-centric approach is the single largest challenge. In George Tarnopolsky’s post on the evolution of programmatic, he warns about some of the challenges associated with the rise of closed publisher ecosystems.
However, the more we can manage who we are targeting/re-targeting online as well as track back to those addressable audiences and the offers to which they were exposed after converting, the more insights we have to begin filling our sales funnel with high-value look-a-like consumers. The more robust our identity management solutions (graphs that include digital and device identifiers), the more we can connect the online and offline data. The clients who have the most robust marketing database and identity management services will, in turn, have the most robust consumer profiles and will begin to lead the pack in digital marketing.
