How can Marketers better understand Online Customers for more effective acquisition in 2011?
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by Robin Goad Research Director Experian Hitwise |
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The success of digital marketing in 2011 will be determined by how well companies can understand their online audience. Every year a greater proportion of marketing budgets are being spent online, yet many companies are adopting a woefully naive “scattergun” approach to digital advertising, with no thought to the quality of the audience they are trying to engage.
To give an example, a high-end automotive manufacturer spent a significant sum of money last year on its online marketing budget to promote a new model it was bringing to market. As a result of this advertising, visits to the company’s website more than doubled, and the company congratulated itself on a job well done. The only problem was that the vast majority of the traffic received had come from one of the prominent used car portals online. The traffic to the manufacturer’s website was from aspirational dreamers, who realistically could never afford a brand new, top of the range vehicle, but nevertheless enjoyed looking at beautiful cars.
This is a stark example, but the principle is true for all digital advertising. Large volumes of traffic alone are no longer enough to qualify as successful marketing; the traffic must come from the core segment of consumers that a company is trying to target in order to provide the best return-on-investment (ROI). The way to direct your digital advertising to those core segments is to understand who your online customers are and target websites that they visit and search terms they use.
Using Mosaic, Experian’s custom segmentation system, it’s possible to achieve both of these goals. Mosaic segments the UK population into 15 Groups and 67 Types, while Hitwise enables you to identify the key demographics of visitors to your website. It might be that your website has a high proportion of its traffic coming from the New Homemakers Mosaic Group, for example. New Homemakers are young urbanites who live in small modern homes in cities like Reading, Bristol and Birmingham. They typically have a net household income of £30,000-£40,000, eat takeaways and read the Daily Express.
Having identified the top Mosaic Groups and Types that visit your website the next step is to target other websites that they visit. New Homemakers, for example, are young people and prolific users of online dating and parenting communities. They are top visitors to sites like eHarmony, BabyCentre UK, netmums and Match.com. The group also regularly clicks on Dominos pizza, Empire magazine and Tottenham Hotspur Football club.
Armed with this information, you will begin to appreciate not only who your audience are online but the sorts of things they like to do. With this in mind, you can develop marketing campaigns designed to appeal to your target audience and therefore have a much higher chance of reaching people who are relevant to your brand. The result will be a more qualitative and targeted marketing approach which will increase your ROI and online conversions.
Thank you to Experian for the use of their Whitepaper.
