On October 21st, I’ll be presenting a webinar about mobile marketing with my good friend Chuck Moxley who runs marketing for 4INFO, a mobile platform that provides businesses the ability to target consumers and track their purchases on a house-by-house level.
If you’re interested in sitting in on the next webinar, you can register here. It’s an in-depth program that’s perfect for advanced marketers who are interested in tracking their mobile marketing budgets on an ROI basis.
All this raises the question — exactly how can you target consumers on their smartphones?
I’m glad you asked.
The key to precise audience targeting on mobile devices is knowing who the device belongs to. Once we know who you are, we can use any data known about you for targeting. This includes past activity, past purchase data, credit data, demographics, propensities to buy certain products, and more.
That said, learning all of this information is a lot more difficult on a mobile phone than a desktop computer because there has been a long-standing, proven standard method to associate a desktop or laptop computer to a person: cookies.
The reliance on cookies is understandable when comparing platforms that use similar underlying methodology, but this is not the case in mobile.
Third-party cookies aren’t supported on all operating systems and even when they are, they don’t persist for more than a few days. This has created many challenges for marketers in their ability to precisely target audiences on mobile devices.
Without a universal standard, literally dozens or perhaps 100 or more companies have set about trying to solve this challenge. The problem with that is that they are all using different methods for tying a mobile device to a person, leaving you—the marketer or agency—confused about which platform to use.
To make matters even more complicated, they all have claims that sound extremely similar and all seem to be using various algorithms and other highly scientific methods of figuring out who the device belongs to.
Research conducted by 4INFO found that most marketers are simply confused by the options. Worse, marketers have often been promised certain capabilities by a platform only to use them and find out they couldn’t actually do what they said they could. So after being burned, many marketers simply don’t believe any of the various claims by the platforms.
Choose the wrong one and you may be reaching the wrong person or unable to target with the data you’d like. So what do you do?
It might be helpful to talk about various methods for audience targeting in mobile, so I’ll be explaining the least complex to the most complex of methods available, in other words, the least precise to the most precise of audience targeting methods.
1. The traditional approach using operating systems and channels
Just a few years ago, a lot of audience targeting on mobile was really limited to either the operating system—so an Android phone versus an iOS phone—or channel, meaning what apps and sites a user is visiting.
For example, if you wanted to reach men, you might look for people who frequently visit a sports app or site so you’d have a higher likelihood your ad is seen by men vs. women. Or if you wanted to reach women, you would target devices whose users visit recipe apps and sites.
Of course, we all know women who are sports fanatics and men who love to cook, so it’s not a perfect science at all. In fact, it’s pretty imprecise. But it was still better than just running ads to everyone since 50% or more of your impressions were certain to be wasted.
2. Getting more sophisticated with real time location targeting.
People then realized that a unique piece of data sometimes available from an ad impression is the device’s location, so marketers started employing location targeting. It could be as wide as targeting specific DMA’s—say a restaurant chain with locations in only 20 markets in the Southeast—or you could do geofencing.
Geofencing is where you target every device seen within a mile of a specific store. Location targeting can be really good for a retail type of establishment who wants to drive people near one of their stores in to hopefully make a purchase.
Of course, you still have some waste because everyone within a mile of a given store isn’t necessarily a prospective customer for that store. For example, Sally Beauty Supply will reach both men and women when geofencing, but I’m guessing the majority of men are not likely to shop at Sally Beauty Supply, and thus that’s most likely a wasted impression.
3. Taking it to the next level by chaining together archived location data.
Following location targeting, a few platforms started realizing that if they chained together location data—so look at where a device goes over say 30 days—they could start to learn something about a person based on where they go and use that to target a specific audience.
For example, a device that is seen at an elementary school, a park and a store that sells children’s clothing could very well be a mom with kids. With that information, a marketer could target devices with that travel pattern and be more targeted than using the device’s current location at the time of serving an ad.
4. The most advanced approach connects customer data to mobile devices.
Finally, as technologies have improved and new players have entered the mobile advertising arena, we are finding more ways to tie a mobile device to a person. And if you know the person behind the device, then you can use the data about that person for targeting.
As marketers we understand that once we know where a consumer lives, we can find out how many kids they have and their ages, what kind of car they drive, how much they’ve paid for their house, what shampoo they purchase as well as the last time it was bought.
So if I can figure out who owns a phone and have their home address, I can now unlock virtually any data for accurate and precise targeting.
For example, customer data, including first party data such as Point of Sale or CRM data, Cooperative Files such as frequent shopper card databases available from companies like Nielsen Catalina Solutions or Kantar Shopcom, and even credit card or debit card transaction data.
Clearly the most precise targeting is when you are able to use data known about a person, since it eliminates guesswork that other platforms require.
For example, instead of guessing a device belongs to a mom with children based on where the device goes, using a data source such as Acxiom or Experian that not only knows the person or if household has children but also knows the ages of the children so you could target households with children under the age of 12 is an incredibly precise and powerful tool.
Of course, it’s also the most complex since it requires that you know to whom the device belongs. Fortunately, more and more mobile ad platforms are finding ways to link the mobile device to a specific person or household, and then are able to tap into that data not only for targeting but also for measurement.
With so many platforms available, it’s understandably hard to tell exactly how each of them is linking the person to the phone without fully understanding their methodology.
The good news is, despite there being dozens and dozens of platforms available, they tend to use one of three common methods for tying a mobile device to a person. Most platforms can be grouped in one or more of these categories, so if you understand the method, then it’ll be easier to compare and understand how they differ.
This is just the beginning.
In future blog posts, we’ll take a deeper dive into how you can use new technologies to get very specific with your targeting. We’ll also talk about ways you can track the results of your campaign — in other words, we’ll show you how to target specific prospects, then track whether or not they actually went to the grocery store and bought your product.
It’s amazing stuff, so if you’re interested, stick around — we’ll be talking more about it in the months go come. Or, if you have a specific question about how to use mobile marketing for your business (and you’re spending more than $500,000 per year on your marketing efforts), email me and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
Disclosure: 4INFO is referenced throughout this blog post. I sit on an advisory board for 4INFO and occasionally provide them advice and input about marketing and marketing technology.
About the Author: Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, a marketing communications firm that helps businesses use the science of marketing to grow their sales and revenues. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.
