With people-based marketing, you can send out the right ad messages at the right time and to the desired end devices of your target customers thanks to an overarching user profile. The requirements for this marketing method and a story of success can be read about here.
Relevant information in each phase of the customer journey
In the office at the computer, at home on the laptop and more or less always with the smartphone – this is the digital world of many potential customers. And these individuals can be addressed via people-based marketing using harmonised ad messages across all channels and devices. At the heart of this is relevant information, which is precisely tailored to the needs of the interested persons in each phase of the customer journey. At the start, they are looking for consultation, and then later concrete offers. Traditional product marketing is placed on the back burner in this case, in favour of a customer-centric approach.
If personalised marketing has been your credo to date, then you’ve got your target group in your sights – such as decision-makers from the metalworking industry who are interested in robot-based assembly lines. Thanks to people-based marketing, direct communication for target groups is possible. The addressee is, for instance, Mr Thomas Muller from the company Machining Muller, who clicked on the respective product in a newsletter link.
B2B companies particularly profit from people-based marketing
However, the requirement for this is knowledge about the contact person in the form of data from various sources. This approach is especially interesting for B2B companies, as these normally know their existing customers well and have lots of information about them in the company’s internal databanks:
- Preferred products to date
- Preferred configurations
- Periods between larger investments
- Standard data (e.g. postal and email addresses)
- On top of this come socio-demographic as well as real estate, car and transaction data.
The individual contact persons at the company are also normally clustered according to department and position. So a buyer can be supplied with certain information and someone from the marketing or product development department with other information. What’s more, the preferred communication channels of the single target persons should be noted. If you collect customer data across all touchpoints and analyse it in real time, you can send out ad messages which are in line with the people-based marketing approach: addressing the right target person through the right channel – on any device.
And if you have identified your best customers and described them with data, then new customers can be addressed in a targeted way who show to have similar profiles and are therefore probably interested in similar offers. If these profiles are entirely unknown, so-called statistical twins can be created via modelling.
Best practice from the financial industry: more than 14,000 new customers
The data service provider and people-based marketing supplier Acxiom developed a cross-channel campaign – for online and offline channels – for a customer from the financial industry. The goal was to find new customers for a total of eight products. Based on CRM-data from the company, a statistical twin for new customer communication was generated and potential customers were contacted via the display, email and postal channels.
The result: more than 14,000 new customers in total were gained. The probability of winning new customers increased sixfold when a person was reached across all three instead of just one of the channels leveraged.
