data points for effective targeting

Increase the Effectiveness in your Digital Marketing Targeting

The ability to target your ideal audience in any digital channel is one of the keys to success in any digital marketing campaign. Market research through the U.S. Census Bureau or behavior patterns from Google Trends and Statista provide incredible insights. We can use these insights as a guide to ultimately decide which digital channels should be included in an overall strategy.

When looking at these behavior patterns and demographic commonalities, it is worth considering tactics that can be targeted more narrowly based on location, by city, zip code, neighborhood, or even specific address.

Every website and social media channel we visit has a small piece of code on it called a pixel. These pixels pass back data that monitor how we use the internet. Google and Facebook are the primary providers of these pixels, and the websites we visit or actions we take online then lump our browsers or devices into audiences. Marketers use those audiences to deliver advertisements directly to individuals who match their ideal customers.

A Digital Way to Target Your Audience by Address

In some display and video platforms, digital marketing professionals have the capability to target these audiences at the address level. With connections to public United States Postal Service data, audiences are tied back to their addresses through their devices or web browsers. Similar to buying a direct mail list of households that meet specific criteria using publicly available Department of Motor Vehicles or voting records, these platforms allow digital marketing to take a similar approach.

While there are initial privacy concerns in doing this, digital targeting by address is actually quite secure. All data is anonymized and the actual address is never shared with the marketer. Privacy laws like GDPR, ePD, or the CCPA have been adopted to ensure customer privacy information is not shared and remains anonymous.

A Digital Audience Targeting Case Study

One of our valued clients sells Harley-Davidson® motorcycles. They sell new and used bikes, service them, and carry an array of merchandise, parts, and accessories. The market for motorcycle buyers is already narrow, but shrinks further to those who want and can afford a Harley®-branded bike. Part of the larger strategy is certainly to be present in Google paid searches for motorcycles or the brand name of the dealership. Given how much of a “club” the Harley® community creates, we deployed a comprehensive social media strategy as well.

To round out all of the parts of a buyer’s journey (or the marketing relay), we also have deployed an addressable strategy with Over-the-Top (OTT) digital video ads and digital display advertisements. These ads display on streaming services outside of the big three: Netflix (no ads), Amazon Prime Video (also no ads), and Hulu (ad-supported subscription options). Instead of looking at Nielsen ratings for traditional TV, which are based on a very small percentage of actual TV viewers, we look at the actual consumer first.

In the 10 zip codes where our client wanted to make a bigger impact on motorcycle owners, we found 3,617 individual addresses, with more than 21,000 devices available to target. Additionally, we know that the average Harley-Davidson® buyer has a slightly higher income, so we narrowed our focus even more with household incomes above a specific threshold. The final strategy was to deliver video on connected TVs, computers, and any mobile device or tablet to the 1,085 addresses and 2,318 devices in the hands of residents of those homes.

data points for effective marketing

We will never know the exact addresses or the names of those individuals due to privacy regulations, and that’s OK. What we do know is that these residents have purchased or own a motorcycle and are more likely to be our customer than who we’d reach while running broad general targeting on traditional TV or cable advertisements.

The cost of this entire campaign to run for 30 days was the equivalent of running a 30-second commercial on traditional TV a single time. In 30 days, we delivered 178,388 commercials to qualified motorcycle buyers on the streaming platforms they are already using for the same cost it would be to run a one-time 30-second commercial during the news. If you’re looking for efficiency and effectiveness wrapped up into one comprehensive digital strategy, digital audience targeting is the clear choice.

The tracking beyond delivery presents additional insights from this type of campaign targeting. When you’re evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign, you would typically look at website traffic and/or conversions, leads, and phone calls. By only targeting 10 zip codes, it is very simple to determine the effectiveness of this campaign. Using Google Analytics, we have seen double-digit increases in website traffic from these areas, as well as increased leads through the client’s website from these zip codes.

OTT Audience Tracking Features

Not all OTT campaigns are created equally, however. We have partnered with OTT providers who offer additional technologies that will not only serve ads across devices of the same individual, but also provide additional physical tracking of those devices.

Every device holds location data through GPS signals, and most apps request your location data to create a more customized user experience based on where you live. This technology has tracked at least five individuals who have seen a streaming video commercial and, as a result, made a physical visit to the dealership, during the time of a pandemic. We can assume that anyone who visits an automotive or motorcycle dealership during this time is likely test driving or purchasing a vehicle. We think it’s safe to say that these campaigns are performing well, both in efficiency in budget and effectiveness in overall strategy.

Digital Technology to Guide Your Marketing Strategy

While privacy regulations continue to evolve and unfold, the reality is, as consumers, we want to see advertisements, especially those that are relevant to our current life situations. There’s this eerie feeling sometimes when we see an ad after talking about a product to a friend, or when we’re pondering a new car, and a TV commercial comes on with an incredible deal. It’s like they know what we were thinking. By having address-level targeting available, digital marketers can develop a truly well-rounded, relay-style strategic plan to accomplish this and grow our businesses.

iFocus Marketing is here to help guide your development and achieve the business goals you’ve already put in place. Are you ready to grow your business? Get in contact with iFocus today to see how we can get you where you want to be.