In his opinion piece, Marcus Stephens, general manager for publishing at Kagiso
Media in Johannesburg, says that precision targeting helps advertisers hit the
mark with consumers.
According to Stephens, “Advertising in the past was indiscriminate, and from the
audience’s point of view, often intrusive and annoying. That picture is changing
rapidly as marketers begin to use targeting to deliver digital ads that are more
relevant, engaging and interesting for the viewer.
“In South Africa, marketers are beginning to wake up to the power of targeted
advertising as a way to win the viewer’s attention and then to guide the person
down the customer journey by delivering messaging relevant to his or her needs
and interests. To make this possible, there is a range of data we can collect
about people using cookies. The data allows us, as publishers and marketers, to
track a web user’s interests and behaviour.
“From the tracking data, we can build a profile of the user’s needs, desires, and
where the person is in the customer journey that we can use to target
advertising with more precision. It’s important to note that this data is not used
to personally identify a user, but rather to segment him or her at a very granular
level.
“This allows marketers to improve return on investment (RIO) by delivering the
right message to the right customers at the right time. It also means that
brands can direct their digital budgets towards people who might be interested
in their offerings rather than to those outside the target market.
“Though this list is by no means exhaustive, there are three forms of targeting
we find gives enormous value to brands that use them: retargeting, behavioural
targeting and psychographic targeting.
“Retargeting is about serving ads to website visitors – advertisements based on
their earlier interactions with the brand’s online properties and content. For
example, if a visitor leaves an e-commerce site having searched for a Nespresso
machine, he or she can be tagged with a cookie.
“The next time there is an opportunity to serve an ad to this potential customer
on a site or network, the person can be targeted with an ad promising a
discount on a Nespresso machine. As such, retargeting is an effective way to
nudge someone who is on the verge of making a purchase towards a
conversion.
“Behavioural targeting is a similar concept. It makes use of information collected
about a user’s web-browsing behaviour (for example, pages visited or searches
conducted) to choose advertisements to display to him or her.
“For example, if a car dealership knows via cookie data that a user has been
browsing the motoring section and searching for BMW Series 3 cars, it can serve
an ad for a test drive to the potential buyer.
“Then there’s psychographic targeting, which is fairly new in South Africa and
less familiar to marketers. The concept here is to use a range of information we
can infer about a user’s demographics, personality traits, interests and beliefs to
target our ads.
“Behavioural data is the starting point, but we can go even deeper than
behavioural targeting allows. We can make inferences about consumers’
personality traits (are they adventurous or timid? fearful or optimistic?), socio-
political beliefs, personal interests (music, sports, movies) and even their
shopping habits (do they shop for fun and buy spontaneously or do they
research every purchase carefully?).
“With enough psychographic data, we can target ads in a very sophisticated
way. For example, a motor manufacturer could target ads at people who have a
need for self-expression, young at heart and love to drive. And combined with
retargeting, this becomes very powerful, because we can start to build a profile
not only of who the customer is but also when he or she is showing intent to
buy.
“This is terrific for marketers, provided they use the access to data to create a
better, more meaningful and more relevant customer experience.
“While it is complex to deploy these strategies, they can lead to far better ROI
by talking to the right people at the right time in the customer lifecycle. And they
build better customer relationships by serving content to the audience that is
actually interested,’ Stephens concludes.
