How connected data can boost brand growth and enhance marketing strategies

It feels more complicated than ever to craft the right message to find the right person at the right time. Omnichannel marketing plans are significantly larger now than in any previous era, and with so many brand options for consumers to try, the need to target the most likely new customers is acute. Traditional brand health and awareness tracking data has become indispensable for many reasons, but for marketers, success today depends on more than that—it’s imperative to truly understand individual customer needs and preferences. And the most effective way to do that is through connected data—building a bridge that links consumer research and brand tracking to marketing and media strategy. How connected data can convert browsers to paying customers A well-known news publisher had a dilemma. Like many news organizations, this publisher found that in addition to its subscribers, a lot of online users—more than 25 million—were visiting its site to browse content. Some of those readers provided an email address when using the site, but many more read anonymously. How could the publisher better understand those visitors—and persuade them to become paid subscribers? To begin with, the publisher started to collect identity data about these readers—an email address, an IP address, a cookie—and linked those identifiers to connected data sources from its market research agency, such as social media behavioral affinities, to create richer and more actionable profiles of these site users. Those profiles helped the publisher’s creative agency craft a prospecting campaign aimed at converting free visitors to paid subscribers and enabled the modeling of digital target audiences. Over the course of a yearlong campaign using those connected profiles for targeted messaging, the company’s digital subscription sales increased 25%. As this publisher discovered, connected data made all the difference. The rich benefits of connected data Connecting data means augmenting invaluable brand health tracking data with a wealth of other data sources, including behavioral, transactional, lifestyle, geolocation or demographic data about the target audience. It can take the form of actual purchase transactions or affinities derived from social media behavior, such as identifying media, brands or influencers these consumers engage with. With the right consent and privacy protections in place, geolocation data becomes a powerful insights tool; it is not just limited to pinpointing where consumers live, but also where they have traveled. Perhaps they have been shopping in sight of certain outdoor advertising, for example, which opens the door to broader use cases like out-of-home advertising effectiveness measurement for brands. By connecting these additional data points to attitudinal tracking data, brands can paint a much broader and deeper picture of individual segments of consumers. That’s the foundation of people-based target segments and lookalike models for digital audiences. This richer picture helps create a more meaningful marketing message or call to action while maximizing the investment in brand tracking data. To build these connected data sets, brands can use their own first-party data, second-party data from partners like the Profiles team at Kantar—which gleans additional data via its consumer panels, which survey more than 170 million people across 100 markets—or the big bucket of third-party data. For maximum effectiveness, brands should consider tapping into all these sources. The wide assortment of potential third-party data includes information from large consumer data companies like Acxiom, Experian, LiveRamp, TransUnion, Epsilon and StatSocial. Like Kantar, many of these companies are collecting consumer data in a privacy-compliant way that makes it possible to connect that data back to an individual panelist’s record. Enriching consumer information using these connected data sources can enhance consumer profiles, uncover additional customer insights and ultimately help figure out how to better reach customers. When a brand team understands what specific consumers are interested in and how they are engaging with their products or services, that kind of insider knowledge can be given to the creative team—or fed into an artificial intelligence platform—to help drive customized, dynamically generated content. Bridging the research-to-marketing gap The most exciting capability—the one that clients are increasingly taking advantage of—is bridging the divide between consumer research and digital marketing. Take a few hundred people from a tracker survey who meet a brand’s criteria: Perhaps they are brand-new customers or highly likely buyers within the brand category. Those people can be used to seed and model digital audiences that are then targeted for actual media activation. Here’s an example: A leading rideshare/delivery services company discovered the power of connected data and how it could be used in media placements when it wanted to better understand how to reach its gig economy earners and possible future earners. The Profiles team at Kantar leveraged social media behavioral data to create richer profiles of the company’s current and potential earners. That included a super-granular look at the media they engage with. Once the insights were in, the chief marketing officer said the data created the “most comprehensive and specific understanding of our earners’ media habits,” allowing the company to find the optimal media placements for future content. From there, Kantar created bespoke target audience segments used to buy ads on social and programmatic platforms. For this type of custom audience targeting, Kantar has found that the lift in brand awareness tends to be anywhere from two to four times what marketers get from an off-the-shelf audience—but has seen as high as 30 times lift by optimizing models to really target in on the right audiences. Unlike the past, when a brand might have done some research and given the creative team a target as generic as “women ages 18 to 34” or “men 65 years and older,” with this kind of connected data in a digital media world, brands can send a tailored message to the right audience to reach a much more specific—and relevant—set of targets that meet the exact behavioral and psychographic target the brand is seeking to engage. The beauty of translating survey-based research into targetable digital audiences is that those audiences are portable across all advertising platforms. This kind of connectivity across ecosystems is more important than ever as marketing budgets continue to shift more toward digital and as media fragmentation makes it critical to find the correct platform to reach the intended audience. Achieving that classic marketing goal—the right message served to the right people at the right place and time—can finally be realized with the right planning and investment in connected data. About Kantar Kantar’s Profiles division is the industry’s most trusted strategic partner for essential data collection. With access to more than 170 million people in over 100 global markets, we provide unrivalled global reach with local relevancy through a range of data solutions. Due to our unparalleled innovations and investment into AI-driven anti-fraud, panel management technology and research design, the Profiles Team at Kantar delivers the quality you expect with the flexibility you need. Jason Dodge Jason Dodge is the managing director of Kantar Profiles Division’s global connected data solutions practice, boasting nearly 30 years of experience. He excels in developing and marketing innovative data solutions that deliver significant client value. Prior to Kantar, Jason was the managing director of global markets at Wunderman Thompson, enhancing its digital data management platform. He also led the retail and consumer goods practice at Epsilon Data Management, driving enterprise accounts like Kraft Heinz and Kellogg’s to success through bespoke data strategies.

How connected data can boost brand growth and enhance marketing strategies

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