In the late nineteenth century American mining engineer Jennings Cox found himself in Cuba in a bit of a fix.

He'd run out of gin and tonic, and guests were on their way. What he did have was some potent local rum. Which he thought he might get away serving if blended with lime juice, crushed ice and sugar. This creative innovation gave birth to the Daiquiri.

Like Cox's rum, data has been around for a long time, we just haven't been sure what to do with it. It's relatively recent that we started capturing it well, and even more recently that ad tech has allowed us to start curating it in a meaningful way. So technology is to data what a blender is to rum, lime juice, ice and sugar.

The first important outcome of that blender and ingredients is our ability to improve audience segmentation. As people spend an increasing amount of time in digital spaces touching on more and more data points they create a growing digital footprint. That digital footprint, when curated well with tools like DMP's, allow us to understand who they are.

Using highly qualified audience segments should be the first thing to do to limit wastage of your marketing budget. But there is a pitfall here - the assumption that you know who your market is and who is going to convert. In reality, you probably don't. That was a limitation that a client we work with recognised, requiring us to get creative with the ingredients we and the client had in their liquor cabinet.

We started with a broad reach campaign with only a few creative iterations, driving response, effectively asking the audience 'who are you?'. To answer that, we washed those responding with the data profiles we already held on them based on their history engaging with Trade Me. Looking at their historic digital footprint allowed us to build profiles based on a huge number of data points... how old they are, if they have a young family, what their interests and hobbies are, what job or industry they're in, what their likely HHI... to name but a few.

Soon an audience the client knew very little about started to appear in great detail. That powered not only audience segmentation, but informed creative insights. For example, by indexing strongly as likely being a member of a young family, a creative iteration that any young family could relate to was re-targeted to that audience segment, or to a lookalike audience, significantly increasing conversion.

This also delivered hints of insight about the product - despite reaching them, who wasn't converting? The client saw a proportionally stronger response from main centres verse the regions. This meant focusing budget to those main centres, while prompting them to consider why the regions weren't converting.

So be creative with the data ingredients and technology available. With enough innovation and experiments your potential customers will want to come to the bar.

If you'd like to learn more about data, book your tickets to Smarter Data Meets CX Conference 2022

Book now

When: 16 June 2022, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Where: Eden Park, Auckland