It is more critical than ever for marketers to build personalized relationships with customers from acquisition to expansion. To accomplish this, marketing budgets are bigger than ever, opening up opportunities to personalize the customer journey, but also raising the need for accountability.
How can you quantitatively prove your campaign’s value? How do you show that increased spending leads to attracting more customers, and of higher quality? How do you differentiate from competitors trying to do the exact same thing?
One way to build, and then justify a more personalized customer journey is to use consumer behavior data— powerful mobile location data about people and places to understand consumer profiles, visitation patterns, location and movement trends, and more. Combine those insights with first-party data to get a deeper knowledge of your own customers, potential prospects like them, and other market-level trends in your industry. This lets you build sophisticated, personalized marketing campaigns to win customers and expand key relationships, all while demonstrating clear ROI.
Here are five ways you can use consumer behavior data to build innovative marketing campaigns:
Acquire Profitable Customers
The more you can target and personalize your acquisition campaigns, the better. However, it can be difficult to go beyond the basics of targeting your audience through broad search terms or single demographic characteristics, such as age, or income level.
With consumer behavior data, you can target bespoke audiences that actually seem like real people with a combination of demographic characteristics all at the same time. This includes data like age and income level, but also more day-to-day qualities such as how much they like to go out, how much they spend on restaurants, whether they like coffee, and whether they drive or take public transit. These details let you build and target rich consumer profiles and personas specifically interested in your business, and then use prospect scoring to determine how profitable each profile will be. This means you’re more likely to spend money attracting only the most profitable customers, optimizing your marketing ROI.
Improve Customer Experience and Personalization
Once you’ve established a customer relationship, one of the next challenges is expanding the relationship. It’s hard to differentiate between one-off customers, and those looking to become repeat buyers, especially when your knowledge of your customers is limited to your own touch points—your first-party data. Consumer behavior data can give you a deeper understanding of your customer base with answers to questions like:
- What else do my customers do?
- What are their demographic attributes, including income, age, and brand affinities?
- How often do they visit my competitors?
- Who else is like them?
The answers to those questions can help you strengthen your customer relationships and with customized messaging, and enhance customer loyalty. Offer opportunities for repeat purchases, first-time discounts to look-a-like audiences, or develop new products and services based on your customers’ interests. You can also update your customer scoring with the additional information, which may upgrade a low potential customer to a high potential one if you know how to appeal to them.
Win Back Lost Customers
Every organization inevitably loses a customer, but consumer behavior data can help you get them back. Some of the most important questions to answer for effective win-back campaigns require data outside your first-party data, such as:
- Where have your lost customers been going?
- Have they been visiting your competitors?
- Could there be another reason the customer stopped coming, like they moved job locations and your store is no longer convenient?
Consumer behavior data can supply answers to help distinguish exactly why the customer didn’t come back, whether the organization had any role in it, and how to win them back. This intelligence can help you correctly target the lost customers with the highest potential to be won back, with the messages that will be most likely to resonate. Just as targeted acquisition campaigns are more likely to succeed, so are targeted, personalized win-back campaigns.
Use Multi-touch Campaigns Across Channels to Increase Conversions
There are so many ways marketers can reach any audience today, that it’s now just as critical to choose the right channel as it is to develop the right message. This is true whether you prioritize digital or non-digital channels. Social media, search, mail, and out-of-home (OOH) advertising all have their place, sometimes even in a certain order, and it all depends on the audience.
With the right data, you can target the right channels for your audience, and build personalized, multi-touch campaigns that combine multiple channels, even OOH and digital touch points. With consumer behavior data, you can combine these channels creatively, retargeting people who walked by a billboard or a store location with digital ads, and then track their actual conversion to in-store footfall. You’ll even learn just how many touches your average prospect needs before they walk in the door and become a customer.
Target Your Competitors’ Customers
One of the most powerful advantages in business is knowing the competition. However, when you rely only on your own data, it can be difficult to gauge exactly how you compare to your competitors. Consumer behavior data sheds light on questions like:
- How many visitors are coming to your stores vs your competitors’?
- How far do customers travel to visit your stores compared to your competitors’? How much time do they spend there?
- What are the demographics and other characteristics of your competitors’ customers?
Answers to these questions give you the additional granularity to better understand your customers and the customers visiting your competitor across the street, literally or figuratively. These details reveal how much your customers’ demographics overlap, whether you actually have a better location, and who else on the block you could target to bring into your business. As you understand your competitor’s customers better, you can also target them with personalized ads that resonate with their affinities, whether they’re a pet owner, parent, or fashionista.
Getting Started
If you haven’t begun incorporating consumer behavior data into your marketing toolkit, now is the time. With massive shifts in consumer behavior and tremendous opportunity for innovative businesses, data intelligence about people, where they go, and what they want has never been more important.
Marketing is no longer about simply reaching as wide an audience as possible, but about targeting the right prospects most interested in the products and services you have to offer. Consumer behavior data gives you the tools to personalize the customer journey—who you reach, which channels you use, how frequently, and how to entice people to choose you.
You can also schedule a demo to learn more about how Azira can help you.