Facts About People Based Marketing, Simplified 09.14.18

Consumers are increasingly demanding more personalization in their interactions with brands. Forrester reports that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.

If you’re wondering how to make your marketing more targeted and customer experiences more personalized, people-based marketing (PBM) is one way to do it.

What is PBM?

PBM is a strategic approach to marketing that allows businesses to target the individual instead of a group, or instead of targeting a random population based on statistics and cookies. This kind of marketing is the most direct and most confident form of advertising available digitally. By relying on behavioral marketing, PBM gives you the opportunity to target with better precision, helping you reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time.

But aren’t we already directly targeting people?

You may be wondering this… and the answer is no. We’ve been targeting devices all this while.

In 2016, the average consumer was connected to 3.64 devices. With that in mind, consider this scenario - a consumer picks up their phone to look up a brand or product, later switching to their laptop or desktop to read reviews, and then drives to the store to purchase the product. When this person logs onto their phone again, the ad for the product that they purchased yesterday pops up, which is frustrating to the consumer because they’ve already purchased the product, and they no longer need to see the ads.

While the consumer may be frustrated, the advertiser who pays for that ad is also frustrated because they’re spending money on displaying the ad to someone who already made a purchase.

People based marketing has a solution to the problem.

With the proliferation of data on the internet, and all the access to big data and analytics, the above problem can be solved. The simple solution is to use all your resources, online and offline, to collate data about persons individually, using your CRM. Your CRM contains a multitude of consumer data that can be used for PBM.

Instead of the old method of gathering device IDs and browser cookies, the new wave of PBM advocates using login data, anonymous persistent IDs and CRM.

How can I make anonymous persistent IDs?

For PBM to work, you need to be able to track one consumer across multiple channels and platforms. Websites like Amazon have achieved this already, by insisting that users need to be signed in regardless of where they are logging in from.

An anonymous persistent ID collates consumer data (such as address, email etc.) and multiple data points to identify the same user across different channels, while simultaneously stripping off personal identifiable information of the consumer, making the process completely ethical. It uses both first party data (that the brand itself collects) as well as third party data (that is bought from an external source).

Advantages of using PBM

PBM is people oriented, which makes your advertising more authentic, so you get more leads. 83% of marketers report getting more leads and more conversions with this strategy.

An anonymous persistent ID creates a profile of the individual, keeping them at the center of the marketing model rather than a device or a target demographic. It allows you to get over the hurdle of double counting when people share devices or use multiple ones. It makes sure that the advertisement targets the person it is meant for.

A study by Infosys identified that 60% of shoppers were favorable to personalized advertisements and that their purchase decisions were influenced by them. So PBM draws an audience more likely to be converted into your conversion funnel – the path that a consumer takes to finally purchase your product.

Cookies are history. Yes, you read that right. Cookies target the device, not the person. And cookies don’t even work on mobile devices. Many advertisers have predicted the death of cookie based advertising by this year. 76% believe that our reliance on cookies will end in the next two years.

How can I implement PBM for my business?

PBM can only work when it gathers behavioral data, like the device being used, what page the consumer is on, whether items are added to the cart, etc.

Many businesses use an automatic email when a consumer leaves a shopping cart. This form of marketing can be made more precise and authentic with PBM. This email doesn’t work because if the client opens the email through their mobile phone (and not the device they accessed the website from initially), the cart isn’t replenished. This is because the email relies on cookie based data which is unable to establish a single consumer across devices.

If you want your strategies to target the right customer and your campaigns to have more weight, PBM can help you achieve these results. Since this is the way digital marketing is trending, it would be smart to being thinking about your PBM strategies today and contact New Angle to discuss your ideas.