How to Drive Consideration Using Audience Data

Today’s consumers are flooded with products and services to choose from. In response, advertisers are working overtime to stand out among the competition while simultaneously facing tighter budgets and more pressure to drive results. Faced with this mix of challenges, advertisers must find the most effective ways to efficiently move consumers down the funnel.

With the right combination of data, messaging, and targeting, you can help consumers learn more about why your brand, products, or services provide them with the best value. By using carefully crafted messaging, you can showcase unique selling points, product features, or brand attributes that set your brand apart from the competition and fulfill your consumers’ needs.

Audience data is a powerful tool for finding, targeting, and driving consideration amongst existing and prospective brand customers. With targeted campaigns — fueled by audience data and insights — ensure you reach the right consumers with ads that speak to their respective needs and interests, driving them further down the funnel. Additionally, you’ll avoid wasting media dollars on uninterested, unsuitable consumers, or existing customers.

Keep reading as we’ll outline exactly how you can get started using audience data to create powerful consideration campaigns.

1. Dive Deep into Audience Data to Reach Your Ideal Customer

As audiences move through the customer journey, from awareness to consideration, each touchpoint should be more targeted and purposeful than the last. As such, ads should speak to specific interests and needs, which requires proper customer segmentation. This can be done in two steps.

Step One: Segment Your Core Audience with First-Party Data

The first step comes from utilizing advertisers’ most valuable resource: current consumers. First-party data provides valuable information such as consumer demographics, attributes, purchase history, and product interest that can be mirrored to create more memorable touchpoints with new customers.

Let’s look at an example.

A Los Angeles-based pizza restaurant is expanding with new shops throughout California. Using their loyalty rewards data, they are able to identify two unique consumer groups that make up the majority of purchases at their stores.

The first is Gen Z-aged consumers who primarily make purchases on Friday and Saturday nights, dine in, and typically order one pizza and a drink. The second group is millennial-aged consumers who order online through the app for carry-out. They typically order a few pizzas and a side or dessert, seemingly an order for a family. This information will help shape the different audience segments the brand should focus on targeting in the areas they are expanding.

Step Two: Enlist an Audience Analysis Tool for Better Personalization

In-depth audience analysis expands into areas that first-party data doesn’t cover such as media habits, and personal values, where audiences typically discover new brands and other psychographic data. These tools leverage global consumer data to gain insights into each audience’s characteristics and identify the most likely opportunities for your media to reach these consumers for the highest impact.

Let’s look back at the pizza restaurant and what an audience analysis tool would uncover.

Gen Z college students spend at least four hours a day on social media. They use TikTok as a primary source of product inspiration and finding new brands. When it comes time to decide where to eat, they prioritize price and finding “a good deal.”

The millennial-aged consumers are avid podcast listeners and subscribe to at least three TV streaming services. They value fresh, healthy ingredients and reliability when deciding where to eat.

The restaurant can use this information to identify what channels and messages they can use to make a targeted impact on new customers.

2. Expand Your Customer Base with Lookalike Audiences

Using both first and third-party data, you’ve identified your most valuable customers. Now it’s time to find new ones. The audience attributes identified in the process outlined above can be used to build custom audiences to target consumers who look and act like your most valued customers. As the campaign runs, optimization tools prioritize consumers most engaged with your content, moving them further down the funnel.

As mentioned, the key to driving consideration is to personalize the content toward each consumer. From audience analysis, brands know what these consumers prioritize. As the consumer learns more about your brand, serve even more personalized ad creative that speaks to their specific needs and interests.

One more look back at our pizza restaurant showcases how this can be put into practice. We know that the Gen Z consumer prioritizes a good deal and uses social media as their main form of media consumption. The pizza shop can geo-target college campuses near their new locations, offering customers 25% off their first in-store order.

As for the millennial-aged consumer, ease of purchase is a priority. They can target these consumers by offering 10% off when they sign up for their app. Alternatively, data analysis revealed that most of these consumers are ordering for a family, so a mid-week promotion offering 10% off when ordering two or more pizzas would encourage orders outside of the typical weekend rush, for instance.

3. The Key to Successful Consideration Campaigns

By focusing on building consideration, you can take consumers from simply being aware of your brand to understanding why your brand is the right choice for them. Ads must be relevant and interesting, offer value, and hopefully encourage action. To achieve this, you must understand your specific audience and how best to reach them across their media journey. If you haven’t already, consider how you can implement audience data into your consideration campaigns to more swiftly move consumers down the funnel.

Digilant’s Full-Funnel Digital Media Solutions

At Digilant, data is at the core of everything we do. We provide in-depth audience analysis using proprietary modeling algorithms built from 18 million+ consumers across 40+ countries, with over 4,000 attributes. This empowers our clients to better understand their target group, focus media spend, identify what creative messaging will have the most impact, and optimize toward the most engaged audiences. Interested in learning more about opportunities for your media to reach your ideal consumers and make a higher impact? Contact us today to learn more.