Personalization has been the gold standard for data-driven digital marketing for many years. But the role of personalization is changing as consumer expectations shift and technologies evolve. Personalization is no longer a value-add, but rather a need-to-have.
Failing to tailor your advertising to your highest-value customers will result in a lack of engagement and handing over the opportunity to convert to your competition. However, being personalized requires an element of restraint and nuance that is sometimes a difficult balance to strike without careful research and reflection on your marketing strategy.
Some methods of personalization are more impactful than others – and the best rule of thumb is to remember to treat your audiences as you would like to be treated. Losing sight of this golden rule can turn your ads from customized to creepy. So, here are three steps for staying on the right side of personalization…
Boost Customer Lifetime Value with Awareness Marketing
Brands, especially those in the ecommerce space, often feel tempted to skip over building awareness and consideration with their marketing efforts and jump straight to conversion-based advertising campaigns. However, brand awareness is a key marketing component to fill the sales funnel that should not be ignored. Keep reading to learn how to optimize awareness campaigns to establish customer lifetime value.
Start At The Beginning
If your core business goal is to drive sales, you still have to do the work to introduce your brand to new customers and convince them why your offering is worth their money.
Even on commerce channels like Amazon, Instacart or Shopify storefronts, you must establish baseline awareness before a consumer will be receptive to your product.
Forrester’s 2021 CPG Digital Go-To Market Review found, “35% of surveyed global CPG marketing decision-makers cite brand awareness as an important metric…brand metrics rank high because CPG/FMCG products are typically low consideration, making it critical for the brand to be top of mind in a category.” So before you begin investing all of your marketing dollars into ROAS focused tactics, put yourself in the consumers’ shoes and consider the information you would want from a brand to take the next steps.
Understand The Customer Journey
To understand how much of your efforts should be allocated across awareness vs consideration vs conversion tactics, look to the purchase journey for guidance.
- What is the average timespan from initial awareness to purchase?
- How many touchpoints are needed to reach the point of consideration?
- How much time does the average consumer spend in the consideration phase?
If your consumers move from consideration to conversion very quickly while in store or on digital retail platforms, the greatest chance to reach them is within the awareness phase. The media objective in this case is to ensure a consumer recognizes your brand when searching for products in your category.
If they spend longer in the consideration phase, you can nurture leads longer with educational content and community building. But it all comes down to understanding how your product or service fits in with their behaviors and routines.
Establish Awareness With An Omni-Channel Media Strategy
Ensure your awareness campaign has broad reach by strategically combining various digital and physical channels. If done right, this will also create a seamless user experience across channels, even with the fragmented media landscape.
How do you know which channel mix will reach your ideal audience?
- Leverage syndicated research to understand their media consumption habits
- Use channels whose userbases broadly match your target demographic
- Select channels where the typical user behavior aligns with the desired action
Use Branding Campaigns To Create Lifetime Value
Once you’ve established awareness, the value of brand campaigns does not end. Awareness marketing aids in fostering an ongoing relationship that we fondly refer to as the loyalty loop. It initially introduces your product to new users, but then continues to establish lifetime customer value after a purchase is made.
To establish this loyalty loop, develop a clear path for your customer. Put yourself in their shoes and understand the timing they need before making a repeat or complementary purchase.
- Is your product a one-time purchase that typically lasts a lifetime?
- Is your product a weekly or monthly staple that is consumed and repurchased?
- What products make sense to recommend based on previous purchases?
Don’t waste money promoting the same product a user has already purchased and is unlikely to purchase again for several years. Instead, remarket them with ads and experiences that reinforce their positive experience with the brand and keep them interested in future purchases. For example:
- Personalized ads and email marketing with recommended products
- Branding campaigns to reinforce brand loyalty and affinity
- Special discount codes and alerts about new product drops or sales
Set Clear Expectations With Measurement
We know advertising works, but success doesn’t typically happen over night. Instead, there is a gradual impact on business results that can be tied to marketing initiatives.. It can be especially difficult to see clear and instantaneous results from awareness campaigns. However, there are strategic ways to understand your progress and ensure you’re moving the needle.
Tracking Short Term Brand Awareness
The primary goal for short-term awareness campaigns is to reach the highest volume of unique users at an effective frequency. Our general understanding is that 2-12 exposures are needed to drive action, which varies depending on effectiveness of creative and the relevancy of the brand. Balance this exposure while being mindful of over saturation.
Metrics to track that indicate brand awareness results:
- Reach: The number of unique users reached, reported by channel and by campaign.
- Frequency: The amount of times a user is exposed to an ad, commonly reported as impressions/reach.
- CPM: The cost of serving ads.
Measuring Long Term Brand Awareness
When media metrics do not answer your business questions, the next step is to incorporate third party studies that show media impact on business results and consumers’ perceptions. These studies show the true incremental impact of awareness campaigns on business goals – whether in driving brand affinity, site traffic or sales.
These are not attribution tools, but rather studies that show correlation. The two most impactful studies for e-commerce based brands are:
- Brand Lift: Difference between control vs exposed survey responses
- Sales Lift: Post campaign analysis comparing media activity to sales data sets
Use both short and long term measurement tactics to craft a story using a mix of KPIs that show media efficiency and channel effectiveness in combination with monitoring sales overtime.
Key Takeaways
- Awareness must come first
- Let the consumer inform your strategy
- Build your brand to increase customer loyalty
- Establish a clear measurement plan to create accountability with branding campaigns
Understanding Implications of the Cookieless Future
Google’s announcement that Chrome will no longer support third-party cookies as of 2024 has many digital marketers concerned about their cookieless future. Marketers that have historically relied on cookies to reach their target audiences and measure success will be greatly affected by this change. Many are actively working on the next steps to avoid campaign performance declines. The actions taken by marketers in this pre-cookieless environment will help define the future of targeted advertising and performance metrics.
“Businesses and advertising professionals will need to better understand how customers make decisions, what actions are valuable for businesses and bring that all together when showing success.” – Maggie Gotszling
Why Are Cookies Important And How Do They Work?
Cookies are a backend line of code on a website. They help advertisers track a user’s behavior across the internet and include 3rd party tracking pixels from platforms such as Facebook. Tracking these activities makes it possible for advertisers to effectively deliver ads to their target audiences and directly measure and attribute conversions. With the deprecation of cookies, that tracking will no longer be viable, effectively blinding some targeting and measurement capabilities on which many marketers currently rely.
What Does It Mean For Campaign Targeting Strategies?
The major impact will be on retargeting third-party cookie-based audiences. It is recommended that advertisers begin shifting overreliance on this tactic and begin testing alternative targeting options to fill the gaps. Gathering first, second, and zero-party data will be central to an effective digital market strategy in a post-cookie environment. Additionally, contextual targeting does not rely on cookies and provides brands with a strong opportunity to generate increased brand awareness when done strategically. As an additional benefit, the cost of contextual advertising is typically substantially lower than addressable impressions as data. However, costs depend on whether you are activating through a whitelist or a private marketplace deal.
Cookieless ID-Based Solutions For Targeting And Measurement
There are also multiple cookie alternatives in development that promise to bridge the addressability gap when cookies are deprecated. Here are a few of the options currently out there or in development.
Google’s Topics:
Google is developing a solution for targeting called Topics. Topics uses an individual’s browsing activity to tag them with broad interest categories. For instance, if a user visits Nike’s website, they may be tagged with an interest in fitness. When ads are served to this user, their browser will randomly choose three of that user’s top five topics based on the previous three weeks’ browsing history. Those three topics are then shared with the advertiser to serve relevant ads to the user during their visit. This method allows the advertiser to target based on interest without using identifiers or other potentially invasive data points.
Standard Universal IDs:
Originally used as a way to combat mismatched data when syncing cookie data across domains, companies like The Trade Desk, LiveRamp, and IAB have developed Universal IDs. This standardized identifier allows advertisers to buy into a community of shared data to track audience activity across the internet. The primary concern with Universal IDs, however, is that they still currently rely on third-party cookies, without which they are unable to set or recognize identifiers across domains.
Encrypted Universal IDs:
Understanding the original design of Universal IDs would no longer be effective once cookies were deprecated, companies like The Trade Desk (Unified ID 2.0) started developing encrypted identifiers using email addresses instead of cookies to track user activity. The primary hurdle with email-based IDs is they require users to provide the same email across websites in order to build an accurate profile. If the user is unwilling to provide that data, or uses different emails for different sites, advertisers will be blind to their activity and be unable to target them accurately.
While all of these solutions have their pros and cons, they are worth monitoring as they continue to develop. They will be key in building targeting and measurement strategies in 2024 and beyond.
Recommendations to Prepare for the Cookieless Future
- Plan early & anticipate impacts to your measurement/attribution system.
- Benchmark your current performance.
- Apply business intelligence models to your analytics.
- Expand implementation timelines.
- Create new relationships with third-party, cookieless data providers.
“Brands who have been targeting super-niche audiences will have to reestablish expectations for programmatic and be open to experiment with alternative targeting and measurement solutions.” – Colin Duft, Account Strategy Director
