As data sources around consumer behavior proliferate, marketers must continually refresh their tool kit in order to more precisely segment, profile and engage their target audiences. But all things being equal, what differentiates a good marketer from a really great one is her ability to make sense out of all the data and tell a story. To build their brands, marketers need to actually use what they’ve learned about their audience to craft stories that personally appeal to individual consumer’s behaviors, motivations and needs — and ultimately lead to more engaging interactions and transactions.
Storytelling is so important and challenging that 46 percent of senior marketers surveyed for Experian Marketing Services’ 2015 Digital Marketer Report said that one of their top priorities is being able to tell their story in order to stand out against competitors.
Essential to delivering on that goal is knowing who your audience is and how to reach them. Through the development of high-definition customer profiles drawn from rich consumer insights layered on top of a marketer’s own transactional and behavioral data, marketers not only have insight into how their target audience thinks, feels and behaves but also their purchase history, channel preference and the optimal mix of media to reach them.
The ability to create high-definition customer profiles is rooted in the creation of segmentations that differentiate consumers based primarily on their attitudes and motivations. For brand marketers, segmentations like these are a hallmark of the craft, but in this age of personalization, maximizing a segmentation’s benefit requires a specific tailored approach for each targeted audience.
With high-definition customer profiles, marketers across the organization have the insights they need to create communication and messaging strategies that will resonate with their target customers across channels and throughout the purchase cycle. By putting the customer at the center of the story, marketers deliver the meaningful and personalized connections that consumers demand leading to higher conversion rates and greater ROI. And more importantly, they lay the foundation for an enduring brand experience.
In our recent report, The greatest stories ever told: Superior storytelling through high-definition consumer profiles, we give marketers tips for telling more engaging and personalized stories, including two case studies that showcase ways that our clients took insights from their segment-driven, high-definition customer profiles to create personalized messaging and contact strategies to reach key audiences.
