How taking a unified campaign approach helps brands outperform benchmarks

Despite having a recent plethora of advanced tech tools and deeper data sources within their reach, brands’ fundamental marketing tactics haven’t changed. Every great ad campaign still starts with a simple question: What audience is the brand trying to reach?

The answer to that question depends on how well a brand understands its customers. That understanding is increasingly hampered by data silos, inconsistent identity signals and disconnected workflows within planning, activation and measurement teams. When those pieces don’t align, the results are inefficient budget spending, incomplete consumer insights and missed advertising opportunities.

To move forward, marketers are taking a unified approach.

Building a complete customer profile enhances campaign performance

The foundation of effective marketing is understanding a brand’s intended audience — not just who the audience is, but also what those audience members care about and how to reach them across devices and platforms.

Achieving that understanding starts by building a complete customer profile. For many marketers, this means linking persistent offline data, such as name and address, with fresh digital signals like device IDs and online behaviors. When combined, these elements provide a high-fidelity view of the customer that can be enriched with attributes like demographics, purchase behavior and lifestyle interests.

Building this type of profile helps marketers understand their consumers and, ultimately, helps construct audience segments that perform at a high level for their campaigns. Whether brands utilize their own customer relationship management data or data from a third-party source, creating addressable segments that are both accurate and scalable can separate good campaigns from great ones.

For example, integrated marketing company MMGY layered first-party data with behavioral and demographic insights to build custom audiences for small-ship cruise line Windstar Cruises. The cruise line was able to refine its campaigns in real time based on those data-driven audience profiles, which helped it more than double its campaign benchmarks.

Similarly, gaming platform Unity used Experian’s data enrichment tools to build custom audiences based on players’ financial attributes and their behaviors across websites, mobile devices and CTV. The audience insights helped Unity’s advertisers reach gaming audiences more effectively by tailoring campaign creative and delivery to real-world player preferences, not assumptions.

A connected activation strategy reduces signal loss and improves accuracy

Once they have defined their audiences, marketers must reach those audiences consistently and efficiently across multiple channels. When consumer identity, audience segments and ad inventory are aligned, marketers, publishers and consumers all benefit. However, market fragmentation is often a challenge during campaign activation. 

Marketers often build audiences within one platform, but activate on another, causing data loss and targeting mismatches. A more connected strategy uses the same consumer identity and audience spine across planning and activation, reducing signal loss and improving accuracy.

Curated private marketplaces (PMPs), for example, enable marketers to match high-quality audiences with premium inventory in a targeted, transparent and efficient way. Deals made through PMPs let marketers align their spending with their campaign goals, whether that’s lowering cost-per-acquisition or boosting reach in a key vertical.

Recent curation performance results bear this out:

• Digital ad agency PMG used data activation platform Audigent’s curated PMP approach in combination with Experian audience data to deliver campaigns that were 44% more cost-efficient across CTV.
  
• Homeopathic medicine maker Boiron used curated media buying to reduce its data costs by 30% and beat cost-per-acquisition goals for both video and display by more than 40%.
  
• Global supply-side platform Index Exchange included inventory curated by Audigent in its PMPs. This resulted in a 70% revenue lift for mobile devices and a 13% increase for CTV.

Closed-loop measurement connects ad exposures to real-world outcomes

Frequently, marketers implement campaign measurement as an afterthought. However, in a connected ad campaign, closed-loop measurement is built in from the beginning to track the customer journey from initial brand interaction to purchase.

By using consistent consumer identity across planning, activation and measurement, marketers connect ad exposure to real-world outcomes — whether that’s an online conversion, an in-store visit or a new customer relationship.

This kind of closed-loop measurement turns the marketing process into a learning opportunity. Brands can track what transpired during a campaign, understand why it happened and use that information to improve a subsequent campaign.

For example, MMGY used Experian’s identity graph to measure how digital ad exposures translated into bookings for Windstar Cruises. Having that level of visibility into the campaign’s performance gave the cruise line the granular data it needed to optimize smarter in the future and to prove return on investment.

Investing in connected ad campaigns now improves future performance

To meet current market demands for personalized, high-performing ad campaigns, marketers must implement a new ad campaign approach — one that starts with a complete understanding of the customer, builds addressable audiences on a strong identity foundation, activates them precisely across channels and measures impact in real time.

Marketers who have embraced this approach have already seen positive results in the form of stronger ad campaign performance and more efficient ad spending. They’ve also benefited from deeper consumer data insights to improve their connected ad campaign performance in the future.

Sponsored by Experian Marketing Services