People-Based Marketing
Building and activating one-to-one marketing solutions with individual customers
People respond positively when brands treat them as individuals. When they feel listened to, appreciated, and understood by a brand, they’re far more inclined to become a customer or stay a customer.
And we have the numbers.
Our recent report Customer Intelligence – How well do you understand your customers? showed that 66% of people are more likely to buy from a brand that treats them as an individual. This is the ambition and rationale driving people-based marketing.
By extracting maximum insight from customer data, organizations edge closer to delivering individualized brand experiences and one-to-one marketing campaigns.
What is People-Based Marketing?
People-based marketing seeks to create a nuanced, more holistic understanding of customers. It addresses them as real people by drawing together first-, second-, and third-party data points from multiple sources. It unites online and offline customer insights, interest and intent data, buying behaviors, and preferences.
This consolidated, detailed understanding of customers enables data-driven personalization of marketing engagement across all channels and devices.
People-based marketing maximizes the likelihood that individuals receive messages that matter to them, and that are relevant and timely. Such human-centric marketing approaches stimulate purchase activity and extend lifetime customer value. They also enable brands to measure and optimize campaign impact down to the individual level, learning from every customer interaction.
Importantly, people-based marketing also enables organizations to recognize individuals wherever and whenever they decide to engage with the brand on an ongoing basis. In this way personalized customer journeys evolve with the individual, helping ensure relevant engagement, relevant experiences and relevant ads over time.
| Definitions: |
|---|
| Zero-party (0P) data: Data intentionally and proactively shared with an organization by a customer such as a poll or a survey (often in return for discounts or other benefits). |
| First-party (1P) data: Data collected directly by a company about its own customers’ interactions and transactions on its platforms and services. |
| Second-party (2P) data: Data that is ethically and legally shared between two companies, often under a partnership agreement, for their mutual benefit. |
| Third-party (3P) data: Data about people ethically sourced from data brokers, advertisers, or other external third parties who have no direct relationship with the people. |
- See also:
- What is first-party data (AKA first party data, 1st party data, or 1P data)
- What is second-party data (AKA second party data, 2nd party data, or 2P data)
- What is third-party data (AKA third party data, 3rd party data, or 3P data)
How Does People-Based Marketing Work?
There’s no single cookie-cutter method of people-based marketing – organizations will shape their approach according to their tech stack, data architecture, capabilities, and commercial priorities. However, the end goal – reaching individuals directly rather than as customer segments – remains constant. Key stages are likely to include:
- Privacy-conscious, ethical collation of first-party, second-party, and third-party data from online and offline sources into a central repository – be it a unified data layer, customer data platform (CDP), or data management platform.
- Creation of a cleansed, aligned, single customer view or identity graph combining all interaction and interest identifiers. To ensure success, this will typically require an identity resolution process to correctly match individuals with their interactions.
- Development of audience extensions to expand reach. A brand may also opt to use the detailed understanding of high lifetime value customers provided by people-based marketing’s holistic approach to build lookalike audiences.
- Activation and orchestration of omnichannel customer engagement – coordinating online, offline, mobile, and social media communications or experiences in unified campaigns to most effectively match customer preferences.
So, for example, a fashion retailer looking to build GenZ interest in its store cards might use a combination of carefully selected social media and influencer channels with targeted direct mail, in-store merchandising, or staff prompts, but be able to avoid promoting to customers already using the card or those who have already turned it down. - Monitoring and measuring campaign performance. By keeping close track of customer engagement and individual channel performance campaigns can be optimized and customer preference data fine-tuned.
See also: Data analytics services: Using analytics to derive insight and optimize marketing decisions.
Benefits of People-Based Marketing
People-based marketing creates an ongoing dialogue with individual customers, building rapport as it builds understanding. This relationship-driven marketing offers a range of tangible commercial benefits, including:
- High-definition customer understanding: by forming a multi-source, multi-perspective, more holistic view of individuals, brands gain deeper actionable insights about their customer base.
- Precise, personalized, omnichannel engagement: correctly organized, there are few more effective precision targeting methods than people-based marketing. By activating deep customer understanding, brands can more consistently reach the right person at the right time in the right place with relevant information to maximize the likelihood of achieving campaign goals.
- Customer loyalty, customer experience, retention, and lifetime value: the ability to understand and respond to changing customer needs and preferences, making them feel understood and valued, helps retain and grow their business in the long term.
- Improved reach without compromising quality: a detailed, broader understanding of customer habits, preferences, and interactions enables organizations to build new prospect audiences for specific campaigns or commercial initiatives with much greater accuracy.
- Maximum marketing efficiency: the coordinated cross-channel approach helps put marketing dollars where they can make the most impact and minimizes wasted spend. Retargeting is driven by detailed knowledge of customer preferences, devices, purchase histories, and buyer behaviors while existing customers are spared promotion of products they have already bought.
- Attribution and impact assessment: With people-based marketing, brands can accurately measure incremental impact and attribute conversions back to specific channels and tactics.
See also: Customer retention: strategies for retaining and growing your customer base
Challenges of People-Based Marketing
People-based marketing takes audience segmentation strategies to a whole new level. It redefines the relationship between brand and consumer and, as indicated above, can generate significant business benefits. However, if you are considering this approach as part of your marketing strategy, there are several challenges to overcome and factors to consider.
Consumers x channels x devices = complexity
The modern customer journey is complex. It’s a multi-channel, multi-device network of interactions and opportunities.
Traditional offline channels (such as direct mail, in-store, or loyalty programs) have been joined by a broad and growing array of digital counterparts. From email, search, display, video, or social, to mobile, CTV, apps, wearable devices, digital-out-of-home, influencer marketing, or virtual reality, brands need to engage customers across a dizzying array of formats, channels, and platforms.
And it’s not just possible, it’s highly likely that a single consumer could engage with a brand across a number of these channels – in person, on a home computer, tablet, or mobile device. And to derive actionable insights the brand has to recognize the individual, monitor and understand his or her behavior from one touchpoint to the next, and respond with relevant communications.
Without being able to connect customers’ identity across channels, understand their interactions and activate that behavioral data, personalized marketing techniques become next to impossible.
While untangling this complexity to serve customers with relevant experiences is a significant challenge, it is also a reminder of how commercially important and impactful successful people-based marketing strategies can be. Using detailed customer knowledge across multiple channels can generate significant advantages.
Data quality, data accuracy
One-to-one marketing solutions like people-based marketing rely on the quality and accuracy of the data that drives them. Without a solid data foundation, the ability to reach precise audiences or personalized engagement quickly evaporates. If customer data is incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date a brand can’t respond to a real person with relevant content.
And even well-maintained data decays over time. People move, change jobs, and change devices. Their tastes evolve and their budgets change. On average, data decays at between 2% and 3% per month, meaning 30% of all customer data needs to be cleansed every year. People-based marketing requires a commitment to rigorous ongoing data hygiene processes.
These data standards must also be applied to any acquired third-party data or second-party data partnerships, with careful due diligence paid to data provenance, completeness, and reliability.
Data privacy concerns
Building people-based marketing campaigns requires the ethical use of customers’ personal information. This means that all acquisition, collection, storage, and usage must be carried out in strict compliance with data privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It also means that organizations must stay apprised of changes in the regulatory landscape (see sidebar).
But brands looking to build one-to-one relationships with their customers need to go further than legal compliance. They need to build customer trust by reassuring them that their data – particularly personally identifiable information (PII) – is secure and will be used ethically.
No matter how a customer’s data reaches a brand, or how many other sources it is combined with, it remains vital that the organization honors the way the person permissioned that data. While people-based marketing has the potential to harness omnichannel activation, a customer should not be surprised by how, when or about what they are marketed to.
Brands need to be open, upfront, and honest about how they process customer data to avoid regulatory penalties, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust.
The Data Privacy Landscape
The landscape for data privacy regulations is complex. Depending on location and trading areas, a business can face multiple, overlapping privacy laws within which to structure its marketing data strategy.
First-party data strategy for much of Europe is covered by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
In the U.S. there is no single data privacy law. The closest thing to it is the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) – at last count 13 other states and counting have enacted similar laws.
Instead of an overarching legislative umbrella, the U.S. adopts more of a sector focus to data privacy. For example, personal medical data is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), financial data by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and education information by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Getting expert advice on compliance with these regulations is a sensible approach.
See also: Acxiom’s Global Data Ethics & Privacy Program
How Acxiom can help: a people-based marketing playbook
For brand marketers, the commercial benefits of successful people-based marketing initiatives should outweigh the challenges they need to overcome. To help accelerate the process, here are some ways Acxiom can help bring these highly personalized campaigns to life.
Identity resolution
Recognizing a customer across multiple channels, devices, and interactions is a significant challenge. But it’s vital to people-based marketing success. This is how a company can identify [email protected] as the same customer identified by anonymous cookie 123 to its digital ad platform, mobile ID ABC on its mobile site, and Rebecca Smith at XYZ Lane in its direct mailing list. This is identity resolution.
Acxiom has been a market leader in identity resolution for more than 50 years. Our award-winning identity solutions and our PII-based identifier, Real ID™, check, match, validate, and append customer data points into more comprehensive, accurate records.
By resolving identity accurately across all touchpoints, brands gain a clearer picture that lets them reach audiences more effectively, personalize the messaging, and measure performance across digital marketing and offline channels.
An optimized identity resolution process enables an organization to map out the best customer engagement journeys by knowing and analyzing the channels a customer prefers.
A firm data foundation
Quality data is the lifeblood of people-based marketing. While it’s a little “which came first, the identity resolution or the data foundation?”, what’s not in dispute is the vital importance of a well-maintained, carefully aligned, accurately consolidated, and ethically sourced data foundation. There are several ways we can help brands establish this data foundation.
Unified data layer
Acxiom’s Customer Intelligence Cloud™ helps brands build a holistic, unified, and comprehensive data foundation – a unified data layer. This is a detailed, desiloed, more holistic view of customers. This cloud-based, open data framework provides enterprises a single source of customer truth across all channels that is the perfect engine for people-based marketing.
Our unified data platform enables seamless integration of marketing and advertising technologies to acquire a target audience while engaging, and retaining customers. It unites every piece of customer information from across an organization’s tech stack.
Third-party data enrichment
The essence of people-based marketing is maximizing the insight into customers to provide relevant engagement. Augmenting existing data with high-quality, third-party data can fill in any blanks in first-party data.
Acxiom’s ethically sourced third-party data enrichment services offer more than 12,000 global data attributes specifically focused on providing personalized experiences – including InfoBase®, Personicx®, and Audience Propensities®.
Second-party data partnerships
An increasingly popular option for finding high-value audiences is augmenting first- and third-party data with second-party data derived from partnerships with complementary brands. This high-quality data can add useful insight into customer interests, behaviors, and interactions.
These second-party data partnerships typically use a data clean room – a secure, neutral environment for the controlled, ethical exchange of data. Acxiom’s data clean rooms enable brands to share aggregated and anonymized customer information, without revealing sensitive PII, to augment customer insights.
Data activation – CDPs
With data and identity firmly in place, people-based marketing needs to be put to work – ideally activated across an omnichannel domain. Many organizations opt to orchestrate their campaign activation through tools such as customer data platforms, or CDPs.
Acxiom can enhance the business value and maximize the ROI of brands’ CDPs by facilitating the design, implementation, operations, and data and identity integration.
Measuring and optimizing performance
People-based marketing offers a powerful way to measure campaign ROI. Measuring at the level of real people provides a clearer idea of brand and sales impact, channel performance, and (crucially) customers’ path to purchase.
Acxiom provides a range of objective, closed-loop campaign measurement services to help identify the incremental impact of digital and offline campaigns to improve people-based marketing performance.
