A Guide on People-Based Marketing

Lately, consumers have quickly come to anticipate a certain level of personalization while interacting with a certain brand. Many touch points guide someone in making a purchase, and today’s customers expect brands to offer relevant recommendations based on their individual shopping histories.

Simultaneously, data privacy is a mounting problem across industries, with many compliance standards and regulations being implemented to safeguard user information. To know more about it, we will be going to discuss people-based marketing in this post.

What is people-based marketing?

People-based marketing is also called cross-device marketing. People-based marketing makes use of technology to market to people across channels. Targeted ads are delivered on various devices and platforms based on user behaviour. Most people and companies consider it people-based marketing because the key is understanding the person, which allows people-based marketing to take place.

Before we move ahead and look in-depth, it is important to have a look at statistics for a better understanding.

People-Based Marketing Statistics

According to a Viant survey on people-based marketing, it was found that:

• 93% of the businesses surveyed ran people-based marketing campaigns on social channels like Facebook and Twitter.
• 90% of the respondents saw “improved performance” from people-based marketing.
• 83% of respondents witness more success from their people-based campaigns.

Now, you must be wondering what makes people-based marketing so different.

What Makes People-Based Marketing Different?

To put it simply, people-based marketing is an advanced version of cookie-based marketing. The differentiating factors here are:

People-based marketing enables you to find the right place to advertise. This implies it doesn’t just show an ad when it would gain ultimate traction but also allows you to analyze the sites on which the ads should be put, all while keeping everything else constant. This involves discovering the right channels to advertise and capitalizing on the expenditure in the most optimum way.

People-based marketing allows you to find the right group of people – Solely based on cookies, it is hard to understand the requirements and purchase patterns.

3 Pillars of People-Based Marketing

Now that you know what people-based marketing is and what makes it different, it is necessary to know the basics of this concept. People-based marketing is established on 3 pillars, the three key factors driving the people-based marketing strategies. These are :

Identification

1. The first pillar is identification, which connects customers to their devices with the highest goal of providing persistent, cross-device recognition for a single view of the consumer.
2. While numerous brands have extensive email databases, they cannot associate their audience with an email address across every device a user might be browsing. On the other hand, brands like Amazon need users to remain logged in to each device for a seamless, integrated experience.
3. This integration lets marketers understand the target audience and accurately create buyer personas.

Data

1. Data is everything. Today, brands have plenty of data on each customer – from purchase data to email engagement to device information.
   
   
2. People-based marketing, with the help of a semantic layer, seeks to transform this data from being shady and unusable to integrating the information and making actionable insights accordingly.
   
   
3. With an identification first approach, this data can be used to actually build customer profiles based on real-time behavioural data or the actions customers take on your website.

Automation

1. Automation is the third and possibly most significant pillar of people-based marketing. So far, automation has been defined by the siloed state of marketing efforts and lack of consumer identification.
2. However, with rising technology, companies today have implemented automation, triggering the sending of an email whenever someone contacts them.

Benefits of People-Based Marketing

Nowadays, users are more engaged across different devices and media than before. Conducting mass ads to reach as many people as possible is no longer useful. Marketers must stay ahead with users more in control of media consumption than ever before. This is where people-based marketing comes into the picture. Here are the top 5 advantages of people-based marketing:

Knowing your target audiences

With more data available, marketers can acquire powerful insights into their audiences’ interests and how to keep them engaged across all media platforms. Marketers can then strategize campaigns accordingly and create meaningful relationships with customers.

Create better content

By studying how the target audiences engage, you can produce content that is more relevant and valuable to them. With people-based marketing, marketers can provide relevant and meaningful ads on the most relevant media platforms.

Avoid ad fraud

People based marketing makes sure that you demonstrate real, individual users with their unique mobile device IDs and consumer profiles. This protects you from the monetary and opportunity costs associated with ad fraud.

Create a long-lasting relationship

People based marketing prioritizes the association that a brand makes with its consumers. It allows engaging with your buyer’s throughout the customer journey, thus making a long-lasting relationship.

Get more bang for your buck.

Learning how to engage with consumers more effectively allows you to build unique and far more effective campaigns. This leads to more engagement with your ads, thus a higher ROI.

How to Build a Successful Person-Based Marketing Strategy

To begin with, people based marketing, your company must have the following in place:

1. Data: Due to the massive amounts of data in today’s marketplace, it can be challenging to collect the required data and demonstrate if that data is high-quality. To comprehend what data you require, consider the following data sources:

First-party data: Data gathered by your company. This can contain client emails or prospect phone numbers.

Second-party data: In this, first-party data is  bought either from the vendor or a trusted source

Third-party data: Data purchased from an outside organization.

First-party data is the most suitable type of data to work with; however, to fill in the gaps, think of working with a vendor with key associations with media providers & other industry partners to get you the first-party data your team requires.

2. Identification: Brands must recognize their potential customers across offline and online media channels. Customers interact with various media daily, and brands must be where their consumers are.

3. Unified Marketing Measurement: You need the right attribution model to standardize and compare data and decide how to spend advertising dollars. While comparing Nielsen ratings with PPC clicks, it can be hard to attribute which channel was more useful, especially when using obsolete models. Organizations taking an omnichannel approach to their marketing should employ unified marketing measurement, which can view offline and online data.

Bottom line

A people based approach needs companies to connect with prospects and consumers using real data-driven marketing and then make informed decisions. To be able to do so in an efficient manner, companies need a refined marketing measurement and attribution platform.  

Marketing dimensions and attribution platforms take whole and person-level customer data and attribute activity to media mixes, messages, and more, all while assuming broader marketing context and external factors. This permits marketers to take a customer-centric approach and optimize campaigns to be most impactful for consumers based on their individual preferences.