For many years, marketing was viewed by consumers and business owners alike as mostly imprecise. You came up with a new idea or partnered with a new marketing agency, and you threw those ideas at the wall and hoped that something would stick.
That observation from David Villa, the CEO of a marketing agency in Florida, says everything you need to know about the changing role of agencies in an evolving ad and marketing ecosystem. Now, every move in the ad and marketing ecosystem must be deliberate. The pressure is on, and agencies are often found reeling.
The Mad Men era is well and truly over, and the age of action, results, ROI, and ROAS is here.
This process starts and ends with deep consumer insight. With performance marketing taking a significant chunk of media spends, ads can’t stop at feel-good, and omnichannel spends can’t be guesswork. They need to be hyper-personalized to get clicks, add-to-carts, and store visits. And yet, less than half of customers say they receive exceptional personalized experiences from brands.
Bridging this gap is every agency is most crucial KPI. Read on to know how you can do it.
3 ways agencies are using Lifesight Audiences
Lifesight Audiences allows you to discover and target consumers using pre-defined audience segments, or build custom audiences based on 750+ functional attributes such as intent, demographics, social behavior, and much more. These holistic audience insights can be leveraged to meet the right customer, wherever they prefer to be met. Think social and display ads, CTV, mobile, DOOH among several other channels.
Make these omnichannel single customer views the foundation of your hyper-personalized campaigns and empathetic marketing strategies. Achieve high ROAS at every touchpoint.
Use Case #1: Build a customer-backwards strategy with holistic consumer insight
Traditional consumer insight was based on primary research. Then came digital ad agencies, which transitioned to using consumers’ digital behaviors as the foundation of their strategy and execution.
Both approaches are flawed because customers’ physical world behaviors are crucial in understanding their lifestyles, content and brand affinities, affluence, etc. Lifesight Audiences allows agencies and, subsequently, brands to truly understand customers’ needs and design a holistic marketing strategy that addresses these needs.
Lifesight Audiences for marketing strategy: An example
Challenge: A media agency working with high-profile luxury brands came to us with a unique challenge. Traditional wisdom and typical expectation of luxury brands is that their quintessential customer segment is affluent individuals in the 40+ age group. This assumption came in the way of delivering high ROI campaigns for a traditional leather goods retailer. Younger audiences were investing in luxury brands but the marketing strategy still catered to the older segments.
Solution: The agency used Lifesight Audiences as proof of what it already knew – that the only way to scale the leather goods brands business and improve marketing outcomes was to relook at the target audience.
Lifesight Audiences derived specific cohorts like Consumer Clusters and Income Range Audiences for a holistic view of luxury shoppers. It demonstrated a large, untapped customer cohort in the region that was visiting high-end brands, hotels, business lounges, and more. They already had an affinity for products and brands similar to the agency clients. With this insight, the agency shifted its marketing strategy and channel spends significantly over the next few months to focus more on younger affluent segments.
Result: The strategy pivots worked, and the leather goods retailer immediately saw a whopping 35% increase in ROAS and ~20% increase in store footfalls.
Use Case #2: Run hyper-targeted, hyper-personalized, and high ROAS campaigns
In a world of relentless ad clutter, standing out requires literally speaking to your customers unique needs. Understanding these needs requires holistic consumer insight.
A customer who visits gyms too often? Could they be a fitness enthusiast? Which ad channels and messaging would work best for them?
A customer who visits the school district every morning – parent of young children? What are their needs? Savings? Spa offers? Maybe kids wear?
What kind of content are specific cohorts consuming? How can brands build affinity with the right influencer and celebrity partnerships, branded content, and channel spends?
Which customer cohorts best suit which brands? From a world of 8 billion unique individuals, Lifesight Audiences finds the right ones for each brand, each campaign, and each creative.
Lifesight Audiences for hyper-targeted campaigns: An example
Challenge: A media agency working with a leading global fashion brand was struggling to mobilize the right target audience for the brand’s summer launch. With conventional marketing tools, they could not go beyond generic demographic insights like females in regions that have summer season, aged 18-28. The agency needed a specific cohort most likely to purchase from the fashion brand’s summer collection to ensure high ROAS.
Solution: The agency used Lifesight Audiences to segment their target audience for hyper-targeting.
With real-time 360-degree audience insights, the agency got a better handle on female customers who:
- visited similar brands and collections with higher frequency
- were acquainted with international tourist spots and had a history of shopping for these vacations
- consumed summer fashion content
The agency then targeted these precise cohorts with targeted ads and messaging. For example, for summer vacation travelers, the ad messaging was all about vacation shopping.
Result: Using holistic customer intelligence to ramp up personalization efforts worked wonders. It led to a 45% increase in visit lift and a 23% decrease in cost-per-visit. Overall, the brand saw a significant increase in store visits, close to ~26K+.
Use Case #3: Improve ad engagement and scale reach with lookalike segments
Traditional consumer insight used small samples and scaled those insights for larger customer segments. Lifesight Audiences uses this conventional wisdom with an unprecedented scale and precision.
More importantly, Lifesight Audiences goes beyond just consumer insight. It helps agencies, and subsequently brands, understand how specific products and ads resonate with specific customer segments. It can then match the attributes of those responding best to particular ads and products to find new targets with similar attributes. It’s called lookalike modeling, and it is singularly responsible for some of Lifesight-based campaigns achieving incredible scale in reach and results. Agencies have been using it extensively for both targeting and retargeting efforts.
Lifesight Audiences for retargeting with lookalike segments: An example
Challenge: A digital agency leading campaign efforts for a leading soap brand wanted to improve its targeting strategy and retargeting results.
Solution: Lifesight Audiences segmented campaign targets based on 360-degree insights to generate granular geo-behavioral cohorts. Those who responded best to the campaign’s initial phase then became the foundation for micro-segments for retargeting. A deep dive into the attributes of this segment revealed that maximum ad engagement had come from:
- regions where dry skin is a significant issue
- individuals who often traveled to those locations
- cities where water quality was hard
- individuals who consumed content on dry skin care
Though these were not the key messages in the campaign’s first phase, it was apparent that these specific cohorts were looking to try new soap brands to address specific skin issues.
The agency and the soap brand returned to the drawing board to understand the new soap line’s specific USPs for dry skin and hard water regions. The agency then doubled down on those aspects of messaging. They also used lookalike modeling to target a larger cohort with similar attributes in the next campaign phase.
Result: Lifesight Audiences helped the agency achieve a 224% spike in ad engagement.
Achieve better marketing results with Lifesight Audiences
Lifesight Audiences adds nuance, insight, and actionability to the marketing strategies and advertising executions you perform on behalf of your brand clients.
We have been working with agencies to deliver anonymized 360-degree audience insights for robust targeting and improved ROAS. These insights have boosted brands personalization efforts, created stronger channel strategies, and improved store footfalls.
Book a demo to unlock Lifesight Audiences use cases and the power and potential of holistic customer intelligence.
