Leveraging Audience Management Tools to Optimize Marketing Spend and ROI
Like so many aspects of modern marketing, audience management relies on data. Your level of audience management maturity is based on your ability (or lack of) to leverage your customer data and apply it in a way that enables messaging to be personal and consistent across channels.
Audience management tools are an important part of this process. They give you insight about different customer segments and can help you build detailed audience profiles. They make the data – and the audience segments created from that data – actionable.
That means that marketers can create omni-channel campaigns that are relevant across all channels and touchpoints and get the right messages to the right people. The best part? All of this is measurable. An audience management platform makes it possible to fully understand the ROI of all your marketing initiatives.
Key Capabilities of Audience Management Platforms
Personalization platforms are equipped with audience discovery and management tools l that use data and machine learning (ML) to deliver unique experiences to customers as they navigate various offline and online touchpoints. Robust solutions like Monetate typically combine dynamic testing and targeting capabilities with AI-powered personalization engines that automate and streamline customer segmentation.
The capabilities that make audience management so effective include:
- Data collection and segmentation – Collects first and third-party data from your website, CRM, and other sources like ad campaigns and social media profiles. It then uses this data to segment your audience into groups.
- Customer segmentation – Builds profiles and creates customer segments from using data like customer behavior, demographics, and interests. This is the main ingredient you need to target personalized content to a given audience, no matter what touchpoint they’re using.
- Cross-channel tracking – Monitors engagement across channels like email, social, web, and paid media. This helps you understand how each interaction, piece of content, and campaign, contributes to your overall ROI—crucial information for optimizing your approach.
- Attribution modeling – Analyzes the impact of each channel in the buying journey so you can optimize spend accordingly.
- Predictive analytics – Models customer lifetime value so you can forecast potential revenue streams from individual segments. Using behavioral segmentation to predict future behaviors allows you to be proactive when creating campaigns, content, and strategies for the various audiences you’re targeting.
- Integration with other martech tools – Integrates with other tools in your marketing tech stack and seamlessly shares audience data with all tools. This keeps you coordinated across platforms and is the only way to maintain consistency across the many different apps, channels, and devices your customers are using.
Strategies for Improving Marketing ROI with Audience Data
The primary goal of audience segmentation is to identify distinct audience groups so you can build a marketing strategy that resonates with each of them. Unearthing high-value segments is a key part of this process since it means you can focus spending more on the groups that generate the highest value for your business—an effective way to improve marketing ROI.
Other ROI-boosting audience discovery and targeting strategies include:
Creating targeted campaigns – Targeting campaigns to specific audience profiles lets you optimize all components of the campaign, from the channels you select to the messaging you create. Campaign Monitor found that when marketers used segmented campaigns, they get up to a 760% lift in revenue.
Optimize marketing budgets – Once you understand what strategies work for a specific audience, you can shift budget away from the low-performing channels and campaigns. This improves your ROI because it makes your marketing spend much more effective (e.g., reduces waste).
Leverage lookalike modeling – Once you know what’s working, you can create new segments by modeling the characteristics of your most profitable segments. These “lookalike” audiences allow you to expand into additional high-performing segments which is what contributes to higher ROI.
Test and iterate – A/B/n and dynamic testing use audience insights to analyze campaigns and optimize future initiatives. This eliminates the guesswork from your marketing approach and allows you to continue offering high-quality experiences to customers.
Tips for Choosing the Right Audience Management Platform
The right technology is what facilitates and enables effective audience management. When choosing a platform, it should be flexible — giving you the ability to add and remove features without rebuilding your entire infrastructure. You should also make sure it integrates with your existing tech stack.
Other criteria to consider: predictive modeling and machine learning capabilities to automate the process of audience segmentation and lookalike modeling. Both are what help you increase revenue and improve ROI.
Since customer data is sensitive information, make sure the tool you select comes with enterprise-ready data security and privacy safeguards. This helps you avoid potential breaches and ensures compliance with global data protection regulations.