What is People-Based Marketing?

In recent years, consumers have quickly come to expect a certain level of personalization when interacting with a particular brand. There are many touchpoints that lead someone to make a purchase, and today’s consumers expect brands to make relevant recommendations based on their personal shopping history.

At the same time, data privacy is a mounting concern across industries, with many compliance standards and regulations being put in place to keep user information protected. Let’s take a look at how organizations can leverage people-based marketing to deliver personalized customer experiences amid an increasingly private data landscape:

What is People-Based Marketing?

People based marketing takes a more personal approach to marketing, allowing brands to customize messaging and deliver campaigns at optimal times. The key to people based marketing is to focus on each consumer as a unique target, instead of segmenting them into broad audience groups.

People- based marketing uses customer data from both online and offline sources to create detailed, rich customer profiles. Brands use this data to determine important outcomes, like sales by each individual person over a certain period of time, patterns of media exposure, and the entire customer path-to-purchase This helps them to gain insights on what drives awareness, positive brand equity, sales, and advocacy.

For online data sources, people- based marketing reports customers’ behaviors and brand preferences in response to messages and placements across every marketing touchpoint. It also examines the synergies across media at the individual level, unlocking opportunities to optimize targeting, media placements, media mix, and message rotation. For offline sources, people-based marketing delivers insights for individual customer segments, by examining how they interact with specific messaging, such as the TV network it was featured on or which daypart a message was shown in.

In this way, people- based marketing helps brands view customers as individuals, enabling hyper-personalized targeting and engagement for deep, meaningful connections. This type of personalization is quickly becoming a necessity for effectively winning customer loyalty; 91 percent of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.. Personalization also has an enormous impact on the bottom line:

One-fifth of retailers do not have a personalization plan in place, but 96% of retailers agree that personalization does influence purchase behavior.
Nearly 60% of shoppers who have experienced personalization believe that it played a role in the final purchase decision.
Personalization delivers measurable results with 88% of marketers seeing measurable improvement due to personalization, with more than half reporting an improvement of more than 10%.

Personalization shows customers that brands understand their unique interests and pain points, as well as the online and offline channels they prefer across the marketing mix. The advanced form of personalization is people-based marketing, which can track customers across devices to give them personalized experiences at times they are likely to convert.

People Based Marketing’s Personalized Approach to Multichannel & Cross Channel Marketing

People- based marketing takes a more personalized approach to multichannel and cross- channel marketing, because marketers need to be able to tailor personalized messages to clients and prospects across channels.

Multichannel marketing - through which users leverage different channels such as online, in-person, call centers, and more to independently communicate and purchase - requires personalization because each channel acts as its own unique entity. Therefore, because there is no communication between channels during the customer journey, customers need to have new, excellent, well-targeted experiences on each platform to lead to conversion.

With cross-channel marketing, customers’ activities are connected throughout their buyer journeys. A customer’s’ experience online, in-store, on the phone, and more are linked, and should build off of one another to guide customers towards the point of purchase. Personalization is key here as well, since each interaction needs to include specific information from previous touchpoints.

People-based marketing helps enable successful multichannel and cross-channel marketing by giving brands a deeper understanding of customers’ media mix patterns and preferences. They can then use these insights when structuring future hyper-personalized campaigns.

Benefits of People-Based Marketing in a Cookieless World

As we move toward a cookieless world, many organizations must consider how they can continue collecting valuable insight into customers while maintaining compliance with emerging regulations. People-based marketing offers numerous benefits that help combat this challenge, including the following:

Better Message Tailoring: Since people based marketing focuses on the person and not just the cookies in a browser, this creates an opportunity for you to tailor creative messages that resonate with your target audiences.

A More Omnichannel Approach: Since you are basing ads on people instead of cookies, you can reach your target audience more effectively both online and offline.

The Right Media and the Right Time: Gain deeper understanding into which media is converting and when target audiences are more receptive to your ads.

Less Wasted Media Spend: By focusing on the right target audience with the right message on the right platform, you will be wasting less money on media that wasn’t delivering marketing ROI.

Expand Your Reach: You can gain more customers by targeting prospects who are similar to your current client base. By developing look-a-like audiences, you can better target audiences who may be more receptive to your product offerings

How to Build a Successful Person-Based Marketing Strategy

In order to get started with people based marketing, your company must have the following in place:

Data: Due to the enormous amounts of data in today’s marketplace, it can be difficult to collect the data you need and to establish if that data is high-quality. To understand what data you need, consider the following data sources:

First party data: Data collected by your company. This can include client emails or prospect phone numbers.
Second-party data: First party data bought from a vendor or trusted source
Third party data: Data bought from an outside organization

First party data is the best type of data to work with, however, to fill in the gaps, consider working with a vendor who has key relationships with media providers & other industry partners to get you the first party data your team needs.

Identification: Brands need to ensure that they are identifying their potential customers across offline and online media channels. Consumers interact with various amounts of media each day and brands need to be where their consumers are.

Unified Marketing Measurement: In order to normalize and compare data, to figure out how to spend advertising dollars, you need the right attribution model. When comparing Nielsen ratings with PPC clicks, it can be difficult to attribute which channel was more effective, especially when using outdated models. Organizations who are taking an omnichannel approach to their marketing should be utilizing unified marketing measurement, which can take offline and online data into consideration.

The Next Steps: Leveraging a People-Based Marketing Platform

A people based approach requires companies to create connections with prospects and customers using real data-driven marketing, and then make decisions based on it. To be able to do so in an efficient manner, companies need a sophisticated marketing measurement and attribution platform.

A marketing measurement and attribution platform takes aggregate and person-level customer data and attributes activity to media mixes, messages, and more, all while considering broader marketing context and external factors. This allows marketers to take a customer-centric approach and optimize campaigns to be most impactful for individual consumers based on their unique preferences.

Additional benefits of a marketing measurement and attribution platform include:

Better relationships with media providers via data access and a thorough understanding of what will resonate with their audiences
More timely decisions due to clear, actionable insights and metrics
In campaign optimizations through unified marketing measurement, allowing companies to see what media and messaging is working and pivot if necessary.