Consumers’ brand interactions today look more like a pinball bouncing off multichannel touchpoints than the traditional model of linear movement through a funnel. This complicates marketers’ age-old goal to get the right message in front of the right customer at the right time—from high-level brand awareness ads to those that drive real-time sales.
With tight budgets and CMOs’ imperative to accelerate growth, it’s important to ensure consumers are viewing high-performing, relevant content whenever they reach the point of decision. Leveraging precision marketing to optimize ad performance at the decision stage can significantly accelerate time to purchase, while decreasing cost per acquisition.
What is precision marketing?
The precision marketing model uses market segmentation to drive real-time sales through personalized, action-oriented content that is constantly tested and iterated based on data. This enables you to build a bank of content that’s winning in the market to retain, cross-sell, and upsell existing and new customers.
Precision marketing is based on a plan for continual testing and iteration, called a learning agenda. This begins with a hypothesis about the potential effectiveness of content presented to a clearly defined market segment.
For example, imagine that you are a food delivery brand hypothesizing that a specific demographic, ages 18 to 35, may prefer to order from a fast-food chain vs. a local restaurant. You can A/B test ads that feature those two restaurants. Then, once you’ve identified the top performer, you can further optimize the ads by testing other variations, such as the message, theme, product imagery, colors or the size of the call to action.
Consumers’ brand interactions today look more like a pinball bouncing off multichannel touchpoints than the traditional model of linear movement through a funnel.
Similarly, a CPG brand launching a new gender-inclusive skincare product might hypothesize that the product will appeal equally to people of all genders between the ages of 20 and 40, across all domestic markets. A first step may be to test imagery of people representing various gender and age groups across all markets to determine if it skews. Real-time data will inform where to focus next-stage efforts.
But effective precision marketing goes beyond sourcing and analyzing data for the purpose of micro-targeting. It engages consumers across multiple channels by applying channel-appropriate creative and messaging that addresses each stage of the path to purchase. What consumers wants to hear when they are information gathering may vastly differ to what they want to hear when they’ve made their decision and are ready to purchase.
Often, creative teams lead campaign messaging strategy within a silo. Instead, precision marketing delivers the best results when data, creative and production teams work together—from strategy to ideation and creative production to iterative execution.
Start with strategy for best results
You will have limited ability to grow a thriving precision marketing ecosystem without a strong strategy—an obvious but often-overlooked factor in content optimization and sales growth.
An opportunity assessment is foundational to effective strategy development, beginning with data analysis to establish a baseline. This enables you to identify opportunities for growth, set goals and measure future content performance.
What to look for in a creative production partner
Key qualities in a creative production partner will determine the speed and efficacy of efforts to optimize ad performance. Remember: Precision marketing requires a high volume of assets that allow you to implement changes quickly.
Look for a partner that has the expertise to interpret data and produce insight-driven versioning at scale, across all channels, to leverage and optimize an ad testing environment.
Additionally, choose a partner that has effective technology and automation, which will make the frequent content iterations cost effective. Predefined templates can help expedite ad modifications while maintaining brand standards and—when applicable—adhering to industry regulations, enabling you to do more with less.
In Tag’s precision marketing creative production work for one client, we tested a variation in a banner ad creative that reduced the cost per acquisition by 78%, compared with the campaign average. That data enabled us to further hone the creative, moving the client closer to its goals.
This is the type of opportunity for improvement that comes from building your precision marketing model with a strong strategy and experienced creative production partner with expertise across digital strategy, creative ideation and production.
Precision marketing drives customer loyalty and retention
Even better, precision marketing provides returns beyond conversion of new customers. It allows you to better influence each stage of the buyer journey, all the way to customer loyalty and retention. Through ongoing versioning, you can further optimize ads that retain, cross-sell and upsell existing customers, providing a hyper-personalized experience that boosts consumer satisfaction. And that’s the goal—happy, repeat customers.
