We recently interviewed Ann Kennedy, chief product officer at ShareThis, to discuss the power of data-driven marketing and how it drives better performance. ShareThis is a LiveRamp partner; its data is available through the IdentityLink™ data marketplace feature.
What are the biggest challenges digital marketers face today?
Understanding how to reach consumers in an online, cross-device, saturated media environment is a data-driven marketing challenge that marketers face across the board today. Marketers have an endless supply of data sources, but not all deliver their intended result.
To combat this challenge, marketers should understand their data sources to ensure that the data they use is transparent and privacy conscious. In addition, consumers interact with brands in multiple ways across the web. Finding their most recent interactions is key in order for marketers to reach their audience in relevant moments.
What innovative ways are marketers using data to improve campaign performance and learn more about their customers?
Ultimately, the success of data-driven marketing will increase when marketers know not only where their customers are, but also how to engage them at the appropriate time, with a relevant offer. So marketers need to innovate in two ways. First, in the ability to know which channels consumers spend the most time on. Second, and more importantly, in the ability to combine these channels, be they offline or online.
For example, marketers can now utilize many inputs in their targeting, including keyword, search, and social functions, that allow for either granular or scaled targeting efforts to help find new customers. Through CRM data, marketers are able to identify their most promising customers based on frequency, spend, visits, social behavior, and conversion rates. The ability to build custom lookalike audiences empowers marketers to identify new consumers and increase their lifetime value.
Why are custom audiences important for the marketplace today?
Brands and advertisers are looking for ways to tailor their campaigns to the specific behaviors and needs of consumers. Custom audiences allow marketers to create and distribute audience segments that are hyper-targeted to their specific campaign.
For example, a custom audience may allow you to include not only interest attributes of your targets, but also details such as competitive products and keywords that signify seasonal activity. ShareThis, specifically, creates custom audiences through real-time social data, which include searches, shares, engagements, and click-backs to create complete portraits of consumers’ online behaviors.
Advertisers can take full control of audience size depending on if they are interested in lower funnel targeting or upper funnel reach, which can be optimized towards specific KPIs.
What’s your advice for digital marketers looking to become more data driven?
The foundation to data-driven marketing starts with CRM insights —some marketers would refer to this as a source of truth. Here marketers can understand the interconnectivity of demographic data points and better understand their consumers. With a regularly refreshed CRM file, plus the ingestion of real-time data, marketers are in a good place to understand their consumer outside the walled gardens of the big social companies, and to observe social data themselves.
To really get the ultimate insight into their consumer and the most out of their data, marketers can append consumer personas by layering in a data provider’s information on top of their view of a current website visitor. This gives marketers more access to all available open garden behavioral, interest, and intent data. By combining all three sources of data, marketers are in the best position to validate their insight into customers’ offline and CRM behavior and to paint the best picture of their consumers.
What can new clients expect from our joint offering?
ShareThis and LiveRamp’s partnership helps marketers improve the lifetime value of their consumers. Through IdentityLink’s data marketplace feature, brands can purchase ShareThis data for their campaigns to find new customers, ultimately increasing marketers’ share of wallet. LiveRamp IdentityLink enables ShareThis data to have strong reach within the digital ecosystem, while making data portable to any customer or platform. Together, we enable a high-quality, consumer-centric, and privacy-forward approach to data-driven marketing.
To learn more about LiveRamp data marketplace or how to access ShareThis audiences, contact LiveRamp.