Programmatic Guide Part 1: Organize Audience Insights

Great marketing begins and ends with the audience. Part one of this five-part series on programmatic buying reveals how brands that organize their data are best equipped to make vital audience connections.

Step 1 – Organize audience insights [You are here]

Step 2 – Design compelling creative

Step 3 – Execute with integrated technology

Step 4 – Reach audiences across screens

Step 5 – Measure the impact

Why it matters

Through their purchases, loyalty, and brand advocacy, consumers reward brands that are relevant to them and deliver great experiences. Relevance, however, is not created overnight or in a vacuum. Brands that organize their audience insights and use customer data effectively will be best positioned to appeal to their target, and increase the impact of their campaigns. When audiences are precisely defined, it’s easier to be relevant, delivering the right message in the right moment.

Here are the opportunities, takeaways, and best practices from marketers who have found success by using audience insights to inform their planning.

The opportunity

Today’s consumers expect marketing messages to be tailored to their needs. Once you have a full view of your customers, the next step is to reach them in the right moment with the right message. And reaching your audience is now much, much easier.

The programmatic revolution has focused on combining data, machine learning, and automation to drive better performance. These benefits have carried over to the world of media planning, where the foundations for campaign success are built.

To save marketers time and improve performance, Google Marketing Platform¹ has been optimized to streamline campaign planning. It uses machine learning to analyze past campaigns and recommends the right inventory and targeting based on your unique goals and what’s performed well historically. That makes it easier to go from insight to impact.

How to succeed

Gather your audience data

By aggregating data sources—whether digital analytics data, offline data, CRM data, campaign data, or third-party data—you can gain a comprehensive view of audience engagement. Each audience interaction has the potential to make the brand smarter. Start by taking advantage of the data you currently have and build from there.

Invest in a tag-management system that gathers your audience interactions across all touchpoints. A system that matches engagement data from multiple devices and sessions is best, as it ensures a fluid, unified view of the customer across your interactions, as well as first-party data accuracy.

Analyze for instant action

Regularly analyze audience, creative, and media insights to learn what’s working and what’s not. Choose an analytics tool with attribution modeling, which will help reveal which channels are driving the most engagement. You’ll be able to explore which audiences are most profitable, which display the highest engagement levels, and which creative assets work best across audience segments.