Marketing success can sometimes come in the most unlikely of combinations — reminiscent of a great chef crafting a delicious dish from ingredients rarely used together. In advertising, this type of outside-the-box thinking can give you a competitive advantage over peers who are operating within the normal limits. In this blog post, we will explore how both financial and non-financial advertisers can use consumer financial marketing data in their ad campaigns to connect with the right consumers. This type of strategic thinking will make campaigns more effective, resonate more deeply with audiences, and turn your chicken into coq au vin.
Background on Financial Audiences
FMCG Direct, a Deluxe company, in partnership with Experian, has developed financial audiences that deeply understand consumer financial behavior. These audiences are not just static lists of potential customers but are constantly updated to provide a multi-dimensional view of consumer financial habits, including investing, borrowing, credit card preferences, and more. Central to this effort are Consumer Financial Insights®, Financial Personalities® and ConsumerSpend® models. These tools are built utilizing a combination of FMCG Direct, a Deluxe company in-depth consumer research, sophisticated clustering techniques, and Experian’s extensive consumer marketing data.
FMCG Direct, a Deluxe company financial audience segments
The Financial Personalities® segments categorize consumers based on their financial behaviors and preferences, dividing them into distinct categories such as insurance, credit card usage, and investment habits. This allows for a targeted approach considering each consumer’s unique financial behavior and potential needs.
Meanwhile, Consumer Financial Insights® segments offer a detailed and tiered view of a consumer’s economic status, including insights into household deposits, investable assets, net assets, and the likelihood of mortgage refinancing, all categorized into specific tiers to reflect varying levels of wealth and investment.
Lastly, ConsumerSpend® segments provide a look at how and where a household allocates their disposable income. Broken up by nine unique categories, marketers can better understand where people are spending their money each year.
These predictive segments are built through extensive research, surveying over 25,000 consumer households across the United States. Each household’s financial profile encompasses a wide array of data points, such as total household assets, deposit balances, and investable assets.
The result? A granular understanding of consumer financial behaviors, which marketers can use to tailor their financial services offerings. However, the potential applications of these insights extend far beyond the confines of financial products and services.
Here are some ideas to help you get started.
Advertising campaigns for travel and leisure
Launch campaigns that precisely cater to different consumer segments’ unique financial personalities and spending behaviors.
- Credit Card Financial Personality: Launch digital ads for luxury travel experiences tailored to consumers known for extensive credit card usage in travel, capitalizing on their affinity for high-end leisure activities.
- Deposits (Bank) Financial Personality: Implement advertising campaigns for budget-friendly travel options tailored to consumers with modest bank deposits and prudent spending habits. These ads could highlight affordable vacation packages, discount travel deals, and value travel bundles, catering to those prioritizing cost efficiency and practical travel solutions.
Ideas focusing on home improvement and decor
Craft advertising campaigns aimed at audiences with modest net worth, using insights into their financial profiles to promote accessible and essential products and services.
- Net Asset Score (Lower Tiers): Develop ad campaigns for cost-effective home improvement services and budget-friendly home appliance options, targeting consumers whose net asset scores indicate more modest financial resources. These ads should highlight the products’ durability and energy efficiency, appealing to the consumers’ need for long-term savings.
- Discretionary Spend – Home Furnishing: Design ad campaigns for upscale home furnishing collections, targeting audiences with significant discretionary spending power. These ads should spotlight your home furnishings’ premium quality, sophisticated design, and superior craftsmanship, appealing to consumers’ tastes for luxury and exclusivity.
Campaigns for consumers in entertainment
Execute targeted advertising campaigns designed for consumers with high disposable income, utilizing insights from their net asset and investable asset scores.
- Net Asset Score (Higher Tiers): Launch advertising campaigns for premium entertainment experiences, including exclusive concert seats, backstage passes, and custom festival packages. Target consumers whose net asset scores suggest significant disposable income to ensure your promotions reach the most likely attendees.
- Discretionary Spend — Entertainment: Design advertising campaigns for high-profile music and entertainment events, focusing on individuals known for their significant expenditures on entertainment. Create promotions that resonate with their lifestyle, emphasizing the connection between a vibrant social life and exclusive entertainment opportunities.
As you can see by understanding and utilizing the nuances of financial data, advertisers can create highly targeted, relevant, and effective campaigns across various sectors. This approach exemplifies the innovative spirit of audience usage, proving that with a bit of creativity, data applications are as limitless as our imagination.
Financial Personalities and Consumer Financial Insight audiences and their in-platform names
Find these syndicated audiences in your demand and supply-side platform of choice.
- Insurance financial personality – Audiences to help understand a consumer’s behavior and confidence in their ability to find the right life insurance.
- Financial Personalities > Insurance Financial Personality
- Financial Personalities > Insurance Financial Personality
- Credit card personality– Used to identify consumers based on their credit card usage and behaviors.
- Financial Personalities > Credit Card Financial Personality
- Financial Personalities > Credit Card Financial Personality
- Deposits financial personality– These audiences include consumers who are likely to look for bank offers based on their spending behaviors.
- Financial Personalities > Deposits Financial Personality
- Financial Personalities > Deposits Financial Personality
- Investments financial personality– Audiences to help understand a consumer’s comfort and behaviors with making financial investments.
- Financial Personalities > Investments Financial Personality
- Financial Personalities > Investments Financial Personality
- Home equity financial personality– Audiences to help understand a consumer’s home equity circumstances and behaviors.
- Financial Personalities > Home Equity Financial Personality
- Financial Personalities > Home Equity Financial Personality
- Mortgage financial personality– Audiences to help understand a consumer’s behavior and preferences with mortgages.
- Financial Personalities > Mortgage Financial Personality
- Financial Personalities > Mortgage Financial Personality
- Investable assets (FLA/Fair Lending Friendly)*– Audiences that include consumers who have available investable assets in seven total tiers with Tier 1 being the highest, and Tier 7 being the lowest.
- Consumer Financial Insights > Investable Assets
- Consumer Financial Insights > Investable Assets
- Net asset score (FLA/Fair Lending Friendly)– Predict a consumers likely net asset score ranging from less than $25,000 to over $5,000,000.
- Consumer Financial Insights > Net Assets Score (Net Worth)
- Consumer Financial Insights > Net Assets Score (Net Worth)
- Discretionary spend– Predicts the annual discretionary spend for the category listed in the audience.
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Travel
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Jewelry
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Home Furnishings
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Entertainment
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Electronics
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Education
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Donations
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Dining Out
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Total
- Consumer Financial Insights > Discretionary Spend – Clothing/Apparel
- Household deposits/balances (FLA/Fair Lending Friendly)– Audiences that include households that have bank deposits balance in six total tiers with Tier 1 being the highest, and Tier 6 being the lowest.
- Consumer Financial Insights > Household Deposits/Balances
- Consumer Financial Insights > Household Deposits/Balances
- Investment Balances (FLA/ Fair Lending Friendly)– Audiences that include consumers who have an investment balance in six total tiers with Tier 1 being the highest, and Tier 6 being the lowest.
- Consumer Financial Insights > Investment Balances
- Consumer Financial Insights > Investment Balances
- Mortgage refinance (FLA/Fair Lending Friendly)– Predicts the likelihood the consumer is to refinance their mortgage.
- Consumer Financial Insights > Mortgage Refinance
- Consumer Financial Insights > Mortgage Refinance
Footnote
* “Fair Lending Friendly” indicates data fields that Experian has made available without use of certain demographic attributes that may increase the likelihood of discriminatory practices prohibited by the Fair Housing Act (“FHA”) and Equal Credit Opportunity Act (“ECOA”). These excluded attributes include, but may not be limited to, race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, disability, handicap, family status, ancestry, sexual orientation, unfavorable military discharge, and gender. Experian’s provision of Fair Lending Friendly indicators does not constitute legal advice or otherwise assures your compliance with the FHA, ECOA, or any other applicable laws. Clients should seek legal advice with respect to your use of data in connection with lending decisions or application and compliance with applicable laws.
Latest posts
If you live in an early primary or caucus state, you’ve probably already had your fill of political advertising. According to The Washington Post, politicians and political groups spent more than $23 million on campaign television ads as of December 1, 2011. With record ad spending predicted for the 2012 election, the rest of the nation will soon be bombarded with television ads “approved by” politicians from the left, right and the center of the political spectrum. Candidates and those groups that support them need to know where to allocate their ad dollars to either connect with their base or reach swing voters. Experian Simmons analyzed the viewing audiences of over 600 broadcast, cable and syndicated TV programs that were measured in our most recent National Consumer Study in order to pinpoint opportunities for politicians to reach partisans and middle of the road voters. This analysis has already gathered the attention of major media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, AOL, Huffington Post and more. Below are the entertainment and news programs that score the highest concentration of liberal Democrats among their viewers, Conservative Republicans and Middle-of-the-Road Voters registered with any party. Be sure to check out our free 2011 PoliticalPersonas report in which Experian Simmons delivers the mindset of the American voter, including attitudes, brand preferences and their penchant for social media. You can also check out a similar analysis of TV preferences of political partisans that we conducted last year here and here.
Social media continues to be one of the fastest growing industries online. Between September 2010 and September 2011 visits to Social Networks and Forums have increased by nearly 11% and, if you saw my Internet clock blog last month, social media accounts for nearly a quarter of all time spent online. But when are people engaging with social media the most? We took a look at the UK Internet visits to the Social Networks and Forums category each month between 2009 and 2011. We then averaged those visits across the months to see the seasonal trends with social media. What this shows is that social media usage is at its lowest at the beginning of the year and climbs throughout the course of the year towards a peak in December. Over the last three years December has always seen the peak of online visits and in fact last Christmas Day Facebook overtook Google for the first time ever in terms of UK Internet visits. We know that Christmas is a very social time and a time for sharing messages with loved ones, friends and family, so the increased visits to social networks during December is to be expected. More generally, what this graph shows is that social media observes two seasonal trends. The first is an early summer peak in visits in June, before a decline in visits in July and August. This seasonal dip in July and August can be explained by summer holidays where people are more likely to go abroad and therefore less likely to be using social networks. The second seasonal trend is a recovery in visits in September and October before a yearly peak at Christmas. With students starting university terms, kids going back to school, and the working population returning from holiday this would account for the increased interaction in September and October before the Christmas surge. In particular what we’ve seen in September data is a resurgence in market share of visits to Facebook, which bounced back after the summer dip to account for nearly 52% of all visits to a social network. The message here for brands who want to capitalise on social media traffic is to start implementing their social strategy now rather than waiting for Christmas. As October is the second busiest month of the year for social media visits we are expecting over 800 million hours to be spent on social networks this month, which represents a huge opportunity to engage with new and existing customers online. Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.
Marketing by mobile device is now as popular as ever as retailers send shoppers text messages with special offers and sales. More and more companies are also offering their own phone apps so customers can search for product information and deals on the go. With more than 80 million mobile internet users in the United States, retailers can really benefit from this communication channel. One perk for shoppers is that they no longer have to save and print out coupons from emails! Through their mobile phones, shoppers can receive texts about sales and coupons as they enter stores. They can keep track of their favorite stores and make a purchase anywhere/anytime. One perk for shoppers is that they no longer have to save and print out coupons from emails! All they have to do is show the coupon on their phone at the point of purchase to redeem their coupon. With “QR” bar codes or quick response codes directly on coupons on your phone, savings can be redeemed on the spot. While many people don’t know yet that they can use QR codes on a mobile device, retailers have only begun to take advantage of this technology and more customers are now able to scan items in a store and pay for it using their mobile phones. While it’s just the beginning of a new era, mobile marketing is taking us by storm and now is the perfect time to put this trend into effect.