TARGUSinfo Interactive Insights

Love it or hate it, we learned early on that doing your homework makes a difference.  So now that you your mind is made up and you are committing resources to leverage predictive analytics– what’s next?

You’ve gained acceptance from the top (see, “The First Step is Always Acceptance”) and your leadership has bought on to the idea that analytics is going to be the foundation of your future strategies. Your next step must be to gain a better understanding of  how your peers are using analytics. 

How is your industry using analytics?  Have they already started segmenting their customers?  What types of results have they seen?  Which partners are they choosing if any, to help achieve their goals?

During our recent Scoring Summit, I heard countless applications of real-time preditictive analytics.  For example, Clearwire leverages a data-driven customer acquisition strategy that offers a clear direction for others to follow.

A research-based strategy can help you better understand and evaluate the additional steps that will be necessary to achieve your analytical-based goals. 

When you achieved company buy-in, hopefully you established whether or not you have the right personnel, IT infrastructure and any other necessary tools in place.  Deciding the necessity of those tools will lead you down the path to acquiring the right software, people or both.

The best part of the research process will be training your personnel’s collective minds to start using the analytical sides of their brains.  Asking relevant questions, seeking answers, and implementing actions (wash, rinse, repeat) will enhance your internal analytical processes.

If the project you are researching has anything to do with customer scoring, segmentation or platform-based analytics stay tuned to my updates about how our customers are leveraging real-time analytics to enhance their customer’s experience and bottom-line.

Deryck

@DeryckDC

You don’t need me or any other marketer to tell you that the Hispanic population growth is real. 

Kelly McDonald, the guest keynote at today’s Professional Marketing Association (PIMA) Midyear Meeting in Leesburg, VA, made it clear that marketers need to start thinking about it RIGHT NOW.

Why now?  According to McDonald, the upcoming US Census will unveil that there are 50 million Hispanics living in America.  That number is particularly impressive when she detailed that 50 million means:

1) US Latino population would be the third largest Hispanic country in the world

2) US Latino population is larger than the entire country of Canada

Has your organization felt this wave of opportunity or panic (depending on your situation)?  Do you know how many of your online leads are Hispanic?  How do you know your online ads are reaching Hispanics?

Regardless of your situation, the need to identify, verify and score customers is real time is universal–regardless of industry.  At TARGUSinfo we see firsthand the power of being able to work with clients to help identify targeted audience groups to customize their messaging at every interaction.

Hispanics are online. Hispanics are among the fastest growing purchasers of goods and services today.  Hispanics are here to stay.

It’s a great event so far, and I look forward to learning more about the challenges facing the insurance market and how interactive marketers can help.
Rufus

@RufusManning

Offline marketing professionals haven’t spent the past decades combing through your garbage to better understand consumers. Rather, they’ve turned predictive modeling of household segmentation into a science to send targeted messages and promotions via offline channels such as telephone and direct mail.

Anonymous Household Segment

This practice has established a clear path for online marketers to follow—anonymous offline household segmentation data can increase the effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns.

US household data is abundant and accessible, and the technology exists to integrate it into behavioral targeting campaigns.  Leveraging this information to improve campaign performance is something every marketer should be doing.

Behavioral targeting, and online marketing in general, is finding a great deal of success in boosting ROI and eliminating wasted impressions. However, it is not a perfect science. The missing link for online marketers is being able to establish a true link between user behaviors online and something more “tangible” in the real world that proves their actual purchasing behavior.

Solving this problem doesn’t mean having marketers staked outside your house and going through your garbage.  In the real world, every US household belongs to an anonymous segment based on non-PII information.

According to David Baker at Razorfish:

Audience profiling is becoming a real-time effort. Why is this important? You spend a lot of
money to reach and acquire new customers (for sales or publishing purposes) and rarely are you
validating the people you are targeting with any third-party source.—The Cost of Data

Creating online representations of these segments, bringing that offline visibility online, allows for customized creation of advertising, marketing and promotional campaigns.

Online marketers have traditionally used clickstream data to segment and target audiences. However, clickstream data isn’t necessarily predictive. You can get an idea of potential user needs and behaviors to help guide marketing efforts, but getting a more complete picture of your audience will lead to better campaign performance.

Factor in seasonality (ie; holiday shopping, back to school, etc) and finite interests such as planning for a wedding or preparing for a baby and your targeting results could be skewed.

Complementing behavioral targeting and other existing media programs with verified offline data such as anonymous behavioral data, buying patterns, demographics and lifestyle data can create more accurate household segmentation.

That segmentation applies across channels as well, and can be leveraged at every interaction with a customer (lead generation, call centers, point of sale, etc.). Integrating anonymous offline insight with anonymous online profile data rounds out household segmentation and facilitates the creation of custom segments to better improve revenue and efficiencies.