When was the last time you saw an ad and thought, “Why did I get this? I’m not in the market for a moon bounce.” Now what about the time you saw an ad and thought, “Wow, that’s spot on. I do need a new air fryer.” Which experience did you prefer?
Advertisers continuously strive to deliver relevant marketing campaigns that delight customers and achieve business goals. Relevance, after all, is the very essence of creating a great experience. However, it’s not easy to deliver great ad experiences. As customers expect greater relevancy and advertising industry dynamics change, first-party signals have become a critical foundation for reaching the right customers with the right messages.
First-party signals represent anything an advertiser or marketer is able to derive from the experiences customers have while interacting with their brand. And for marketers looking to improve advertising performance, using first-party signals has become table stakes. Whether it’s capturing signals as the result of customer engagement or trying to learn more about your existing customer base, the value that first-party signals bring to a brand can help at every phase of the advertising cycle.
While first-party signals are not new to advertisers, organizing and managing them present many challenges. Siloed marketing channels can make it difficult to create campaigns that reflect recent and meaningful events, impacting relevancy and performance. Using second- and third-party signals can enrich an advertiser’s view of its customers, but how to manage these partnerships effectively to deliver relevant insights is not always apparent. And then there’s the uncertainty and complexity of today’s constantly shifting customer journey.
Modern marketers should use first-party signals to empower their audience-led marketing strategy. This journey can be broken down into four key steps.
1. Unify your signals
Marketers today face a challenging landscape of data siloes and fragmentation while working to unify signals. It’s like trying to finish a puzzle when all the pieces are in different rooms. Breaking down barriers within their own organization, as well as through their many partnerships, must be a priority. Often, as marketers go through this process, many realize they have access to better first-party signals than they may be using in ad campaigns.
So, the challenge is often less about the breadth of signals and more about access to those signals in a usable format. The more signals an advertiser can unify, the more audience depth they create. That depth can uncover the insights that will help them better understand how to deliver on customer expectations.
Getting this kind of 360-degree customer view frequently requires a purpose-built cloud-based solution, like those available from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
2. Build an insights-driven plan
Once signals are unified effectively, advertisers need the tools to create an insights-driven plan. Better insights help advertisers more accurately and efficiently answer the questions they have about the wants, needs and attitudes of their customers. This is how to bring more value to your customers.
This is where a solution like Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) comes in. AMC is a secure, privacy-safe and cloud-based clean room solution designed to help uncover new insights, maximize marketing performance and discover the impact of cross-media investments for Amazon Ads customers. AMC helps advertisers tap into rich, pseudonymized signals from Amazon, as well as combine their Amazon event signals with their own first-party insights, to help create a holistic view of their marketing impact anywhere customers spend their time.
3. Activate your insights
Signals and technology fragmentation can make it difficult to meet customers’ expectations of
timely, highly relevant experiences. Robust customer analysis can provide brands and agencies with insights on how to engage audiences across an ever-increasing and complex media supply landscape. This activation needs to be scalable, brand-safe and effective. Tools like dynamic creative optimization and machine learning can then provide customers with the type of personalized experience that is right for them.
Working together, Amazon Ads and AWS help customers join audience signals, analyze those signals to drive business outcomes, and activate insights across marketing and advertising channels. By storing insights on AWS, customers can manage streamlined tools to analyze and draw insights from Amazon Ads signals stored in AMC. For instance, AMC Insights on AWS helps advertisers and agencies running campaigns on Amazon Ads to easily deploy AWS services to analyze and visualize reporting.
4. Create your feedback loop
CMOs and the agencies they work with are under increased pressure to measure marketing performance and optimize advertising investments and performance.
Using better, unified signals can uncover meaningful learnings that will provide insights into future advertising efforts. For advertisers to create the type of feedback loop that powers an upward ROI trajectory, measurements need to be captured in a safe environment that can be applied directly to future campaigns. In the Amazon Ads + AWS approach, advertisers can analyze campaign performance with holistic campaign measurement in AMC, and uncover more robust trends and insights with AWS business intelligence services and solutions.
The result is clear: ad experiences that delight customers and deliver meaningful business results. That’s the key to the AWS + Amazon Ads approach; combining the world’s most broadly adopted cloud service with a powerful, multichannel ad service to turn first-party signals into high-performing campaigns that enhance the customer experience.
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Joseph Luchs is a technology leader and entrepreneur with a particular expertise in SaaS, DaaS, cloud infrastructure, ad tech, mar tech and fin tech. He currently leads the Amazon Ads + AWS Global effort.
