It’s not dropped out of a helicopter after all…
It might come as a surprise to some, but efficient and intelligently targeted campaigns can be achieved through the doordrop media channel, writes Steve Jenkins, head of insight at Whistl.
According to my postcode, Experian Mosaic profiles me as living within a ‘City Prosperity’ household. It’s true – I have many of the attributes of this consumer segmentation group; city living, career focused, partial to Waitrose shopping and couldn’t live without the internet; it’s a solid start but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Geo-demographics and media planning
The use of geo-demographics prevails in media planning and gets more and more sophisticated with every advance in technology, evident in the meteoric rise of programmatic spend and multi-platform device behaviour.
Mosaic is built using 800 million data points, to accurately group together demographic characteristics, lifestyles and behaviour into 15 ‘Groups’ and 66 more detailed ‘Types’ – a powerful currency for effective media investment particularly since this segmentation is now aligned to both offline and online.
The value of adding client data
This efficient approach is further refined when clients overlay their own customer intelligence to create richer target segments, harnessing the granular data they have about who is already engaging with their brand. For retailers, the combined intelligence of geo-demographics and spend data delivers an accurate picture of who their customers truly are, and where they can find more of them – retention and acquisition rolled into one planning approach.
Retailers build an accurate view of where their customers live, how much they spend and their frequency of shop to define optimum accurate store and online catchment areas to keep speaking to them.
Spend analysis uncovers emerging customer groups to fuel acquisition strategy and exploit any shift in spending habits. In the age of discounters and one touch retailing, commingled with increasingly unprecedented consumer choice, this level of insight is invaluable.
[advert position=”left”]
For example, an affordable grocery retailer who typically connects with a mid to low affluent consumer may unearth insights to show higher affluent customers are also buying from them, but at key times, such as Christmas when people want their budgets to go further.
Moreover, an ‘on-trend’ High Street retailer who appeals to a younger audience who buy the latest fashion in bulk also discovers they appeal to older customer types who want the occasional latest runway copy, buying less frequently, but with a higher basket value. Although these periphery groups are ‘less likely’ to be core customers, they still represent real value.
Creative importance
This enriched layer of spend data has incredibly powerful creative implications for even more efficient targeting. Identifying these unique customer profiles enables tailored marketing messages by these unique geographies; showcasing quality product ranges appealing to some, whilst frequent, priced based offers resonating more with others.
A drive-time analysis around a store catchment using online sales data can accomplish even more targeting efficiencies; tailoring messages to high spending customers from catchment areas that might have been excluded from footfall marketing.
One-size doesn’t fit all planning
Crucially, this planning approach is scalable – major retailers use it to gain a national customer overview but it is applied on an individual store basis to capture key differences in customer profiles by store type and location
Spend analysis demonstrates that customer profiles are distinct not only by geography and frequency, but by what they are actually buying. A wider product-range, higher value basket on the weekend compared to more sporadic, cursory purchases during the week.
By segmenting store portfolios and tailoring communications in a way which is personable, engaging and relevant, store marketing becomes more efficient and effective.
This granular knowledge down to a unique geographic location ensures retailers aren’t limited to a one size fits all marketing approach. This approach also allows these efficiencies to progressively evolve. An evaluation analysing new customer sales data resulting from a campaign can measure its success, provide accountability and contribute to future campaign planning efficiencies.
Its not just device usage which happens in the home
It might come as a surprise to some for me to reveal that these efficient campaigns, intelligently targeted and tailored through geo-demographic targeting, customer spend and store data analysis, are achieved through that somewhat lesser known, doordrop media channel.
It might not be such of a surprise to learn that the channel enjoys less than 1% of the UK’s total media investment. Online marketing, also steeped in the efficient use of data resulting in intelligent targeting (and re-targeting of course) in contrast, is projected to command half of all UK media spend this year.
Data, targeting and efficiency have and continue to be leading forces for ensuring media effectiveness and accountability and quite rightly so; it’s our client’s investment after all.
With the surge in technological advancements, these forces are increasingly centred on device-driven customers, the aim to achieve the single customer view around the multi-platform mantra: desktop, laptop, mobile. Recent studies show* that mobile now accounts for 40% of all online retail sales and 1 in 3 adults uses their tablet at home.
Another suggests that these multi-platform consumption trends aren’t, however, at the expense of traditional media, rather they are in addition to the overall media day.
It would be naïve of me to suggest that a traditional print media such as doordrop could supersede the surge of investment towards geo-targeting from online marketing or indeed other comparable media such as out of home.
There is no doubt, however, that there is clearly a place for a contextually complimentary medium, founded on the similar principles of geo-demographic targeting, for helping achieve efficient media campaigns.
*IMRG Capgemini’s Quarterly Benchmark