Data and advertising were not closely associated until 15 to 20 years ago. Then, marketers began to realize the potential of using technology as the internet became commonplace and smartphones became more popular year after year.
Today, marketing campaigns are increasingly being planned and analyzed with the help of data. As a result, data-driven creative campaigns are becoming more popular, and we’ll take a closer look at the benefits shortly.
A common practice nowadays is programmatic advertising, which uses data to segment audiences and delivers ads only when they are most effective.
In addition to segmenting your audience, you must take the next step to see accurate results. We can move beyond audience segmentation with data-driven creatives and offer personalized advertising experiences to these segmented audiences.
Before we get to the five benefits, we must learn more about the most effective data points to use as guidelines for your segmentation strategy.
Best Data Points For Segmenting Your Market
The following six categories are the most effective data points for segmentation.
Data on behavior
Behavioral data enables users to be targeted according to their web browsing behavior. Cookies track users’ browsing habits on their browsers, including visiting websites, viewing pages, clicking on links, downloading videos, and watching videos. A message tailored to their interests can be targeted to users with similar online browsing behaviors.
Contextualized Data
Targeting can be derived from content viewed by the user based on contextual data. What websites are they visiting? What keywords are they searching for? Answering these questions can help you surface concrete contextual data. The most effective way to target consumers is to use context data to align ad messaging with their current web-behavior.
Data on psychological characteristics
This type of data can provide insight into the “why” of customers’ purchases, such as their personalities, beliefs, values, interests, and lifestyles. A psychological analysis can give you actionable insight into consumer behavior while helping you better understand your target audience and what motivates them.
Data on demographics
Customer demographics provide information on the age, gender, income, marital status, and household size of your customers. Audiences with similar characteristics are often segmented based on demographics.
Data related to geography
This information can determine the location of your customers. In addition, local promotions tailored to each market are vital for global brands to target specific regions.
First party data
You collect this information from your audience and customers. In addition to DSP/DMP data, it’s essential to consider CRM, social, and website analytics data for measuring and optimizing performance.
The 4 Benefits of Data-Driven Creatives
Data-driven creatives offer many benefits. Let’s take a look at four massive ones!
1 – Streamline the creative process
A data-driven creative can be designed and developed in one custom format. Then, once the ad content is loaded, you can use tools to change it as needed.
This not only saves you time and money, but it also helps to keep things simple, targeted, and manageable. And when you’re dealing with multiple creative projects, this can feel like a lifesaver.
2 – Simplify trafficking
With a plan in place to test different variables in your ad, you can traffic a single data-driven creative instead of needing to create multiple, unique creative for every message and size. Much like streamlining, this also saves time and money in the long run.
This benefit also comes into effect for businesses and brands who outsource their advertising and creative teams.
You need one format with multiple interchangeable parts, saving you time and money on outsourcing.
3 – Ads are relevant using dynamic rules
With data-driven creatives, dynamic rules can tailor each impression to the viewer. For example, media or production teams define customer segments while creative teams build creative variants.
You may encounter a more open-ended and cyclical approach to this step than you’re used to during the data-driven process. That is, of course, a significant benefit in and of itself.
The first step of your data-driven process may be to have your media or production teams create dynamic rules. Alternatively, you might want to wait until you’ve finalized all your creative variants before making rules.
4 – Enhancement of the collaborative process
You can share ideas and parallelize workflows by integrating your creative, production, and media teams in one shared workspace.
Creating a campaign today involves each party completing their portion and handing it off with little feedback. As a result, the media and creatives cannot communicate effectively and transparently.
All agencies should be involved throughout the campaign process and communicate with each other for success. We often bring in production shops and creative agencies after big decisions have already been made. Marketers should work with agencies to develop innovative strategies based on data from the very beginning of their campaign planning.
During the development of a programmatic campaign, bring all teams into one room to build the digital brief together. Then, develop a strategy based on this input to ensure everyone is involved from the beginning.
