I had the great pleasure of speaking on the panel of Meltwater’s Insight Driven Marketing webinar with Garmin’s Senior Social Manager, Gareth Crew, and Meltwater’s Head of Marketing, Charlie Ayling, where together we discussed the importance of insight driven marketing.
Insight driven marketing augments the traditional methods of understanding consumer behaviour, and instead, focuses on real-time, dynamic data that delivers more relevant marketing strategies.
Naturally, you would assume that most marketers would adopt an insight driven approach to drive effectiveness. However, over 81% of marketers consider a data driven strategy to be too complicated to implement, leading to 73% of insightful data not being utilised. This article will explain in simple terms how marketers can activate an insight driven marketing strategy in order to help increase adoption.
1. Go beyond demographics to truly understand your audience
Demographics will always have a place when defining an audience if you want to target a certain gender, age or economic status, however we must be cautious of their limitations. Although demographics can be useful in defining what your target audience may look like for an over 50s cruise, they do not account for the individual differences within the group.
Take King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne for example. Both wealthy, 74 year old white males, however their lifestyle, interests and behaviour could not be more different. Therefore, the same marketing strategy will not resonate with the both of them, despite being the same age.
Instead, brands need to move away from exclusively relying on broad demographic factors and deploy behavioural segmentation to truly understand the pain points, needs and drivers of certain communities. Once these insights are gathered, brands can create a personalised strategy to grab their attention and help increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.
2. Discover how your audience defines authenticity
Authenticity is key to successful advertising. Consumers will skip past an ad if it is overdone and doesn’t fit the brand’s story, meaning you could miss out on a valuable customer if your messaging is not right. However, the trick to know is that consumers define authenticity differently, so you need to understand how your audience perceives it in order to resonate with them. For example, extroverted and sociable profiles within the Gen Z cohort view authenticity as being real and messy, which is why they prefer unedited social media like BeReal or Snapchat, over traditional forms.,
Marketers need to change the way they think about media campaigns. Sometimes posting a funny TikTok video can drive greater engagement than a post that has taken months to be created and polished. Influencers are also a great way for brands to improve their brand perception. Hiring influencers with an already established relationship with their audience who trust their recommendations could be a great way to get your product in front of your target audience.
3. Remember to give your consumer a choice
The consumer journey is changing. With AI increasing personalisation and algorithms putting content the user would already like in front of them, the consumer journey is no longer a funnel, but a loop, because consideration and awareness is happening at the same time. Therefore, marketers have a huge responsibility to ensure they are not over-delivering on personalisation where a consumer only gets served certain products, or under-delivering where they can become overwhelmed with a choice overload.
Instead, consumers need to decide for themselves how they like to consume content. Some consumers enjoy personalisation because it makes finding what they are looking for much easier. Others like to consume a broad depth of content and be open to discovering new brands.
Marketers need this balance as one can cut through the consumer journey and place your product right in front of a consumer in a shopping mind frame, whilst the other allows new brands to be discovered and grow. As with anything in life, extremes are not good, so we need to ensure we are monitoring the evolution of technology so that consumers are still being given a choice in order to deliver value.
4. Know when global vs. local strategies are appropriate
It would make life so much easier if we could launch the exact same strategy in every country we want to target, but unfortunately that is not always possible. Brands need to understand when their audiences are similar across markets and when they are very different in order to determine whether a global or local strategy will be more effective. For example, we found that gamers in different European countries have very similar personalities and communicated the same way on social media, meaning one strategy which targeted their personality type could be effective in different markets. Alternatively, categories that were more embedded in culture, such as cooking or coffee, are completely different in various countries, which would mean a local strategy would be more appropriate.
Understanding these nuances between different industries can help brands make the right decisions when it comes to selecting channels, comms, formats and messaging to generate an impact.
5. Measure the impact your campaign has had on your audience segments
You have put all the effort into activating an insight driven marketing strategy, so the final step is seeing if it worked. Often brands have very broad KPIs that do not reflect the core aim of advertising – reaching the target audience. Therefore, brands need to shift to a consumer first approach when it comes to measurement. We recommend measuring against a certain bubble of audiences to see the influence and uplift in consideration or awareness your campaign has had on specific segments and communities. This data can then inform your business strategy because you can phase out your comms approaches and even product launches based on that audience segment.
Insight driven marketing is the future. In order to create effective marketing strategies that will not only reach but resonate with a specific audience segment we need to understand their behaviours. Therefore, brands need to quickly get to grips with insight driven marketing if they want their messaging to make an impact and drive results. If you are not quite sure where to start then contact our specialist team today.
