Advertising should be simple. If an ad is relevant to what a shopper is buying, it’s good. If the ad is irrelevant, it’s useless, wasteful and annoying. Most retailers would agree that this mantra makes sense in theory, so why do so many fail to put the practice into place?
Shopping is a personal experience, so advertising should speak to an individual’s needs, even if they’re shopping for the most basic of items. When tasked with choosing which frozen dinner they should buy or which brand of cereal to bring home from their weekly trip to the grocery store, customers that frequent their favorite supermarkets are constantly making decisions based on factors like their familiarity with the brand, new deals and ads they’ve seen recently. The problem most retailers face is creating an ad experience that is both highly personalized, while also reaching an audience at scale.
With billions of consumers tethered to their smartphones, mobile programmatic advertising offers shopper marketers an opportunity to take precise, accurate targeting to a new level, by reaching the right audiences at higher volumes without sacrificing quality. In mobile marketing, access to quality data often determines a campaign’s success. When marketers apply the right data sets to campaigns, the result is a powerful and incredibly valuable asset for building audiences and mobile targeting.
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E-Commerce brands are no strangers to using programmatic approaches to audience targeting. While online shopping has been steadily growing over the past 10 years, influencing customers to buy in-store is still a must for brands. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, e-Commerce still only represents 8.3% of total retail sales.
Beyond capturing a piece of the rest of that market, brands are incentivized by stores themselves to perform well in-store. If a brand selling chicken nuggets can leverage mobile data to target and convince new shoppers to buy its product, they’ll benefit from better in-store shelf placement, among other things.
To accurately reach the largest and most responsive audiences and drive them in-store, more and more retail advertisers are partnering with data management platforms (DMP) that focus on behavioral data tied to mobile IDs. A user’s mobile ID is essentially a digital, anonymized receipt of their activity that tracks behavior like what kind of apps they use and how often. It’s an anonymized number that’s associated with a mobile device, enabling marketers to deliver relevant advertising to each user.
On a desktop browser, “cookies” are used by marketers to achieve the same goal: give users what they want based on what they’ve already done. Whether the goal for mobile is to get in front of the right shoppers, cost-effectively acquire loyal app users, or drive specific actions, ID-based data makes it all possible.
These three steps outline how retail brands can intelligently advertise to unique types of audiences, even while serving ads within specific geographies:
1. Serve client ads to several segments of known ad IDs
Shopper marketers need the ability to group, or segment, users based on similar characteristics drawn from existing data, such as CRM data on purchase or interaction histories, web site data or other sources. Starting with a list of mobile IDs is a great way to kickstart a campaign — but when parameters like specific geographies are required, expanding the target audience to a size big enough to make an impact can be difficult.
2. Using robust data sets, high-performing lookalike audiences can be reached in specific geographies
Audience size can be effectively expanded using a series of techniques, including building lookalike models and user personas. Purchasing media across a number of real-time bidding (RTB) networks can help deliver large numbers of impressions, even when marketing efforts are confined to a specific geography. Leveraging latitudes and longitudes from supply-side platforms can give precise location targeting so marketers can be sure they’re bringing the right customers into the right store.
3. Expand the audience by using programmatic techniques like lookalike modeling to find new, relevant shoppers on mobile
Personas should be based on real mobile behaviors: the types of apps a user has previously downloaded and engaged with, which is by far the strongest indicator of future behaviors. These personas provide holistic mobile targeting and battle-tested marketing performance. Teaming up with partners that can provide unique segmentation tools can help achieve this step seamlessly, automatically and syndicated across multiple channels.
Today, retailers need to focus on delivering the right ads to the right consumers in order to stand out. Nearly half of consumer regularly engage with food brands digitally before going in-store, according to the Food Marketing Institute. Mobile presents a great opportunity to drive in-store sales, but the key is to reach audiences at scale, with accuracy. Using programmatic techniques like lookalikes and personas can triple click-through rates on mobile shopper marketing campaigns.
Of course, none of this is possible without data. In today’s mobile-first retail marketing ecosystem, it’s more important to find creative ways to build the robust data sets that will guide any successful campaign.
Matt McGinty is Chief Revenue Officer at Fiksu, a data-fueled mobile marketing technology company that connects brands, agencies and app advertisers to precise audiences throughout the customer journey.
