Take Digital Marketing to the Next Level with Enriched Demographic Data

Companies that can successfully target the right customers with the right message at the right time will inevitably do better than those that fumble with general-purpose advertising aimed at a broader audience.

You’re probably familiar with the famous quote about marketing that says “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Although that was true in the past, it simply isn’t the case anymore. Digital marketing has changed everything. Advertising has moved from a “shotgun” approach in which ads could only be delivered to a relatively broad audience to a highly refined, micro-targeted exercise in which the effectiveness of various ads, images, and subject lines can be measured with a high degree of precision. Demographic data plays a critical role in that trend.

Digital marketing automation tools are commonplace these days, yet most businesses are not making the most of them. While the shift from traditional advertising to digital methods has been beneficial, the advantages to be gained from leveraging enriched demographic data and geolocation are even more significant. Most marketers have yet to tap into the vast potential that demographic data has to offer.

Why Demographic Data Enrichment Matters

You likely collect some baseline information from the people who visit your website, customers who make purchases at your brick-and-mortar stores, and perhaps even some users of a branded mobile app. In many cases, there’s a limit to the detail you can gather with each of those tools. You might get minimal information in some cases, such as a name and email address. At other times, such as when a customer places an online order, you might get considerably more, including a physical address and details about other products the customer considered.

By enriching your data with curated information from third-party sources, you can fill in those missing pieces and gain a more complete view of your customers. Demographic data enrichment goes much further than that because it enables you to develop a far more detailed understanding of your target audience.

Data enrichment vastly increases the value of your customer information, helping you to better understand who makes up your audience. It enables you to segment customers into meaningful groups based on their interests, buying triggers, income levels, or other important characteristics. That, in turn, enables marketing managers to make better investment decisions, tailoring their efforts to reach specific audiences with messages that are more timely, meaningful, and likely to produce positive results.

Demographic information can include a wide range of different data points, including age, gender, occupation, education level, income level race and ethnicity, marital status, and more. Each of these helps to narrow the target focus for a specific campaign to address the interests and needs of the audience. Understanding factors such as a person’s household status usually implies certain priorities. A married couple with young children, for example, is likely to be more interested in toys and family entertainment, educational enrichment for their children, and building long-term financial security.

It can even be effective to tailor advertising images to fit specific target audiences. Young parents, for example, may respond best to ads that show a nuclear family with children at play, whereas older couples may prefer something that focuses on their role as grandparents. Simply put, demographic data enrichment helps marketers to refine their messaging in ways more likely to resonate with customers and prospects. By segmenting markets into meaningful groups according to lifestyle, behavioral, or psychographic profiles, you can fine tune digital marketing efforts to achieve higher levels of effectiveness.

Why the Right Data Matters

Data integrity is all about trust. Enrichment must be built with accurate, timely, and consistent data. Extending your consumer information with poor quality data can sometimes be worse than not enriching it at all. Fortunately, there are reliable sources for trustworthy third-party information, built on multiple sources and curated by data enrichment experts.

Global reach is also important. As marketers are increasingly striving to reach a worldwide audience, it can be difficult to source third-party data that conforms to a common standard across multiple geographies.

Precisely offers a robust collection of standardized demographic, geodemographic, and context data designed to help better understand people and the places where they live, work, and do business. These datasets offer information for over 140 countries and territories worldwide, and empower businesses to conduct their analysis at scale. Visualize population counts and characteristics at a nationwide, statewide, census-block, or lifestyle group level, and anticipate and plan for future trends with demographic estimates and projections.

Consider one example of how this kind of information can be valuable to a business. Imagine you’re advertising on digital billboards in a busy downtown area. Your ad spend can be far more effective if you understand who lives and works in the target area. Nighttime demographics (based on where people live) provide one perspective. Understanding the data on the daytime demographics of the area can be even more valuable, though. This is especially true in high-traffic areas, including commercial districts. Precisely’s datasets include mobility data that can help marketers to target specific populations with tremendous precision.

Getting A 360° View

Precisely also offers advanced capabilities that enable businesses to match offline and online data for consumers, resulting in a true 360° view of each consumer.

Matching online and offline records has multiple benefits. First, it enables marketers to identify and merge multiple records that refer to the same person. This can be especially useful in understanding how consumers interact with various channels. Precisely’s records are accompanied with unique identifiers such as a hashed email address, which can be matched to email addresses associated with customer records in your database, and a Mobile Advertising ID (MAID), which is associated with each user’s mobile device. By linking the data and activities associated with multiple records to a single user, marketers can gain valuable new perspectives into customer behavior.

Using Precisely’s APIs, marketers can even update customer activity in real time. For example, if a customer was targeted with a mobile offer while shopping at the mall, and subsequently made a purchase based on that offer, the advertiser could update their records to reflect a successful response. This kind of data can be used to create campaigns aimed at new “look-alike” audiences with similar characteristics to the mall shopper who responded positively to the mobile offer.

Just as digital marketing represents a quantum leap forward, so too, does the use of demographic data to develop and deliver advertising that is highly personalized to the interests and needs of each audience you serve. To learn more about how Precisely can help you achieve greater marketing effectiveness, watch our on-demand webinar, Defining Digital Audiences with Data.