• by Pascal Bensoussan , April 12, 2013

To use data effectively, marketers require a methodology to measure, identify, and target the right data segments across brand awareness, acquisition, site personalization, and loyalty-building initiatives. We call it media intelligence. The tips below can help you avoid a recipe for disaster and help you create effective recipes for online marketing tactics.

Six data recipes

To effectively leverage data, start with cookies (or user’s data stored within a Web browser), considering:

• Cookie durability, which provides sustained targetability and dialogue with audiences, ideal for branding, upper-funnel acquisition, and loyalty programs.
• Cookie scale, which drives mid- to-low-funnel acquisition and direct-response initiatives.

1. Build loyalty: Drive recurring sales online with customer data

To identify existing customers visiting your Web site, onboard offline customer data (i.e., POS, Call Center, CRM). A live map between customers and their online cookies brings offline data online. Online cookies anonymously mapped to customers typically last longer and have more stable performance metrics than other online cookies. They offer a baseline for custom attribution models that identify customer touchpoints driving campaign performance. These cookies offer more robust lookalike modeling to identify valuable third-party data sources for new customer acquisition.

2. Maintain awareness: Find great prospects from premium publishers

Publishers are starting to share their data segments with marketers to provide the control and granularity needed to identify the best audiences and context for their campaigns. A neutral data management or media intelligence platform can prevent data leakage and guarantee privacy for the publisher's data. We find that cookies tied to premium publishers are more durable, easier to target with the right frequency, and offer a more predictive signal to run custom attribution models and drive more efficient conversions.

3. High-quality cookies: Harness cookie quality to improve online acquisition

Leveraging campaign data to detect high-quality cookies systematically can be very challenging. In a recent social campaign, we identified conditions after which one out of five cookies would reliably deliver an 8-12x improvement over the average conversion performance of the campaign! When properly harnessed, this data can be used to detect high-quality cookies and build dynamic audiences that are more likely to convert.

4. Generate intent: Leverage offline purchase data to target and message audiences online

Offline purchase data can build brand awareness and bring new customers online. Online cookies tied to offline purchase data are more durable and more likely to convert than cookies only tied to online behavior. Try using offline sales data to build lookalike audiences that share offline purchase behavior with your customers. This is especially useful in the Consumer Packaged Goods vertical to improve cross-media spending and messaging consistency among targeted consumer segments.

5. Increase Scale: Scale awareness and acquisition campaigns with offline data brought online

Marketing Service Providers (MSPs) have spent the last 20 years aggregating marketing databases accurately describing the demographics and purchasing habits of U.S. consumers. When brought online, selected data segments from MSPs bring incremental scale to demand-generating tactics. The key is to identify data segments that characterize online audiences more sensitive to specific brand messages, user experiences, and product categories. Start by profiling your top-converting site audiences by product and context categories. Used with content-rich publishers and formats such as video, MSP audiences can improve engagement 2-3x and conversions 3-5x.

6. Convert Intent: Convert Web site traffic into new sales

If you aren't already, you need to turn Web site clickstream data into a robust taxonomy, contextually and behaviorally, to better codify past behaviors and interests and identify predictive patterns. Once properly taxonomized, Web site data can grow acquisition campaigns beyond just retargeting site visitors.  With third-party data sources, Web site data helps identify and target third-party data segments likely to visit your Web site, share an interest in your products and adopt similar conversion behavior.

Whether you want to maintain brand awareness, create intent, convert intenders, or build loyalty, the data recipes described here can help you leverage data effectively across multiple verticals, over a large spectrum of data sources, and at different stages in the consumer acquisition funnel.