What Is People Based Marketing?
Historically, marketers used either of two ways to place ads online – one was broadcasting the ad across the web and wait for it to hit every screen. The other was making use of cookies – that is basing ad placements on internet browsing habits. While the second method sounds much more efficient, it misses one key element – CONTEXT.
Therefore, the concept of people based marketing comes into play to fill this gap.
Popularly known as cross-device marketing, people based marketing refers to a strategic approach by which marketers target individuals with relevant messaging across multiple different channels and touchpoints, by relying immensely on data about users’ consumption habits.
Research Insights Around People Based Marketing
According to a Viant survey(1) on people based marketing, it was discovered that:
- 93% of the companies surveyed were running people-based marketing campaigns on social channels like Facebook and Twitter.
- 90% of the respondents witnessed “improved performance” from people-based marketing.
- 64% “believe the industry will stop relying on probabilistic data within the next 12 months to two years”.
- 83% of respondents are seeing more success from their people-based campaigns.
What Makes People Based Marketing Different?
As explained above, people based marketing is a more advanced version of cookie-based marketing. The differentiating factors here are:
People based marketing helps find the right place to advertise – This means it doesn’t just show an ad when it would gain maximum traction but also helps analyze the sites that the ads should be placed on, all while holding everything else constant. This includes finding the right channels to advertise and capitalizing on the expenditure in the most optimum manner.
People based marketing helps find the right group of people – Solely based on cookies, it is difficult to understand the needs and purchase patterns.
How Does People Based Marketing Works?
We’ve already established that people based marketing helps marketers and advertisers capture a 360-degree view of their target audiences, which enables them to be able to advertise more effectively. So how exactly does this happen?
Let us take the example of Andy – Andy is an advertiser for an athleisure apparel company. Andy has data of a user’s cookies from his desktop. He sees that the users had just finished searching for documentaries on Basketball players on Netflix. Taking this into account, Andy develops a persona for the buyer and tags him as a ‘Basketball enthusiast’. Now, any ads that would be targeted to him would be based on this persona.
This may seem to be a very accurate way to market, but here are a few loopholes:
- It only takes into consideration his desktop search data.
- It ignores surfing done on any other device by the user.
- It forms an incomplete and incorrect persona
This method completely ignores his mobile phone search history, his technology magazine subscriptions, and his gaming streaks with his friends.
Obtaining a complete view aids with one of the most excruciating tasks of a marketer – new customer acquisition. With a full view, marketers have the ability to pinpoint real people that had not interacted with their business previously.
The initial, cookie-based approach only told Andy that his target was a basketball enthusiast. But the people-based approach gave him more information such as he is a tech-geek interested in Basketball players and loves playing counter strike. It also tells him what he’d been looking to buy recently by pooling data from all channels and thus helps create a more accurate persona.
Types of Marketing Data
It is a widely acknowledged fact that no marketing campaign in this day and age can yield effective results without data. The same holds true for people-based marketing. The entire premise of people-based marketing is based on data. For this purpose, there are 3 types of data that marketers need to play with:
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First-Party Data
First-party data is the data that your company or team has collected about your customers or audience. This data is entirely owned and managed by you. This can be done through collecting cookies from your website or app, CRM efforts, customer feedback options, POC interactions, or any other information that users have given their consent to.
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Second Party Data
As the name suggests, second-party data is data that has been captured by someone else, which you can utilize for your own marketing efforts. It represents a way to overcome the scale limitations of first-party data and reduce costs associated with acquiring the data.
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Third-Party Data
Third-party data is data that has been aggregated from many different sources. It is often collected by an entity that doesn’t have a direct relationship with consumers. One major advantage of using this data is that it is very rich in behavioral or demographic data.
In order to make the most out of your people-based marketing efforts, it is best to select input data which is a nice balance of first, second- and third-party data. The mix would depend upon the campaign goals and strategy. And in case of second- and third-party data, always opt for partners that provide assurance of quality and compliance.
3 Pillars of People Based Marketing
Now that you understand what people based marketing is and how it works, it is important to know about the foundation on which this concept stands. People based marketing is based on 3 pillars, the three key elements that will drive the people based marketing strategies. These are :
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Identification
The first pillar is the identification, which refers to the process of connecting consumers to their devices with the ultimate goal of ensuring persistent, cross-device recognition for a single view of the consumer.
While many brands have large email databases, they’re not able to associate their audience to an email address across every device a user might be browsing on. On the other hand, there are brands like Amazon that require users remain logged in to each device for a seamless, integrated experience.
This integration allows for marketers to truly understand the target audience and develop the buyer personas accurately.
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Data
Data is the new oil – this saying is actually more applicable in the field of marketing than you’d think. Today, brands have a ton of data on each of their customers – ranging from purchase data to email engagement to device information.
The purpose of people-based marketing is to transform this data from being dark and unusable, to combining the information and create actionable insights accordingly.
With an identification first approach, this data can be used to effectively build customer profiles based on real-time behavioral data, or the actions that consumers are taking on your website.
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Automation
Automation is the third, and possibly most important, pillar of people-based marketing. So far, automation has been limited by the siloed state of marketing efforts and lack of consumer identification.
However, with emerging technology, companies today have implemented automation, triggering the send of an email when an individual makes contact with them.
( Also Read: People based Digital Services in Marketing )
How Does People-Based Marketing Relate to Cross-Channel and Multi-Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel and multi-channel marketing are two crucial strategies that marketers use for customer acquisition and retention. These methods involve managing your brand’s exposure across social media, mobile apps, websites, email, and word of mouth recommendations. Cross-channel marketing provides customers an integrated, consistent experience across your brand.
It’s essential to understand your customers before you create your marketing strategy for them. For this, you should create rich buyer personas that contain information about your customers’ preferences, behaviors, buying habits, and preferred modes of communication. This information can be derived through a people-based marketing approach, which looks at a holistic view of your customer’s data.
From creating brand awareness to generating leads and driving higher sales – a well crafted cross-channel marketing strategy will help you do it all. Tying this in with your people based marketing efforts only enhances the success rate of your campaigns.
How Do People Based Marketing Relate to Post-Click Landing Pages?
The proper conversion following any ad campaign begins with an optimized post-click landing page and ends with a personalized thank you page and email. By intentionally and purposefully reaching out to people who have a relatively high likelihood to respond to certain media and have specific interests, your people based marketing campaign can drive conversions and sales – thus, overall return on your investment. Therefore, people based marketimg
Benefits of People Based Marketing
These days, users are becoming more engaged across different devices and media than they were ever before. Running mass ads aimed towards reaching as many people as possible is no longer effective. With users more in control of how they consume media than ever before, marketers need to stay ahead. This is where people based marketing comes into play. Here are the top 5 benefits of people based marketing:
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Understanding your target audiences
With more data available than ever before, marketers can gain powerful insights into their audiences’ interests and how to engage with them across all kinds of media platforms. Marketers can then strategize campaigns accordingly and build meaningful relationships with consumers.
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Create better content
By analyzing how the target audiences engage, you can create content that is more relevant and helpful to them. With people based marketing, marketers can deliver relevant and meaningful ads on the most relevant media platforms.
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Avoid ad fraud
People based marketing ensures that you are verifying real, individual users with their unique mobile device IDs and consumer profiles. This saves you from the monetary and opportunity costs associated with ad fraud.
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Build a long-lasting relationship
People based marketing prioritizes the connection that a brand builds with its consumers. It enables engaging with your consumer throughout the buyer’s journey, thus building a long-lasting relationship.
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Get more bang for you buck
Understanding how to engage with consumers more effectively helps build campaigns that are your unique and far more effective. This results in more engagement with your ads, thus a higher ROI.
Popular People-Based Marketing Solutions
Now that you’re aware of all of the benefits of people-based marketing, here are the best people based marketing solutions in the market today:
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BounceX
BounceX offers a People Based Marketing cloud and is the first new revenue channel with scale. True to their tagline “Market to people, not cookies”, BounceX’s proprietary identification technology allows marketers to convert unidentified, high-intent prospects into buyers by sending the right message at the right time across any device.
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Acxiom
Acxiom provides a People Based Marketing solution that enables great marketing through a simple, open approach to connecting systems and data that drive seamless customer experiences and higher ROI. It makes use of identity resolution that helps connect data to consumers in a privacy-compliant way.
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AppNexus
AppNexus has partnered with several media agencies to create a people-based framework for advertisers who want to use programmatic ads outside Facebook and Google. This consortium allows the AppNexus platform to make people-based marketing widely available within programmatic channels, thus amplifying the impact of both on your overall customer acquisition efforts.
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LiveIntent
LiveIntent understands that brands need to be present everywhere their customers are present. LiveIntent’s people-based solutions ensure that the brands have a true relationship with their customers, and enables them to “never treat your best customers like strangers and always treat strangers like your best customers.”
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Targeto
Targeto’s people based marketing solution makes it easy for you to manage marketing across a whole suite of different platforms on a single interface. They say they help to “establish one-to-one, cross-channel interactions between marketers and consumers”, leading to increased customer loyalty, a better customer experience, and improved ROI.
Difference Between People Based Marketing & Traditional Targeting Strategies
| Basis | People Based Marketing | Traditional Targeting Strategies |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | People-Based Marketing enables brands to create a cohesive marketing system, centred around the individual consumer and anchored by the collection of real-time behavioural data combined with first party brand data. | General targeting strategy is an advertising mechanism, that allows you to segment some visitors, who meet a defined set of criteria, from the general audience. |
| Placement | This involves specifically targeted ad placements for more effective campaigns. | This generally involves mass ad publication and placement. |
| Data | Ideally a people-based marketing campaign is based on a combination of 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data. | Traditional targeting is usually done based on data on select parameters, and not a holistic view of the customers. |
| Targeting | This involves very precise targeting based on a 360 view of the target customers. | This generally involves broad targeting and mass advertising campaigns. |
| Strategies used | 1st Party data and 3rd Party data | Market ratings and Website cookies |
Final Thoughts
As customers, we always know that it is important that advertising comes to us on our own terms – when we need it, where we need it and how we need it.
Considering the cross-device habits of today’s consumers, this is getting harder and harder to achieve for marketers. Marketers seem to be unable to keep up with the consumer’s rapid and dynamic consumption habits.
This day and age have put consumers in control of the messages they receive. When consumers have this kind of power, the only way to get their attention – and drive conversions – is to engage them with meaning and relevance. In order to do so, marketers must be able to recognize their customers in real-time across all touchpoints.
This can only be done by making complete and unabashed use of people based marketing strategies.
