Data-Driven Techniques to Transform your Digital Marketing

April 1, 2018

By Nick Reid

In this rapidly-changing digital age in which we live, it can be a challenge for dealers, OEMs, and distributors to keep up with new marketing techniques in addition to all the other hats they wear.

However, savvy business01 managers have made staying up to date a priority. As the capabilities have expanded, the digital marketing opportunities have also expanded, particularly for those that are data-driven. One of the most important factors in marketing success is the use of data.

It may have been daunting in the past to maneuver data to get it to work well for you. But the evolution of major digital platforms, such as Google Adwords and Facebook, has presented more opportunities for you to get more out of your data than ever before.

We’d like to take a look at new techniques and technologies that are making it easier for you to reach potential customers and new prospects.

Matching Users on Dominant Ad Platforms

The historical challenge in marketing is making sure the right people see your ads. It has always been easy to get your ads in front of people, just not the right people. Now, data-driven targeting has made it possible to zero in on the exact prospects you want to reach. Many platforms are taking this to the next level by expanding on what data they can capture. The democratization of data matching makes these capabilities accessible to every marketer.

The two dominant ad platforms, Facebook and Google now allow businesses to upload their own customer and prospect lists which are then matched to users of those platforms. While you may think this is only relevant for B2C marketers, the match rates for business emails is quite high, particularly on Facebook. The match rates get even better when you compliment email addresses with phone numbers, business locations, mobile advertising IDs, and visitors to your website.

These matching capabilities, available to every advertiser, empower you to overcome the historical challenge of marketing: your ads are shown to the right people at the right time. And beyond the benefits of capitalizing on the right prospects, your marketing also becomes more efficient. You aren’t showing your ads to the wrong prospects and wasting those advertising dollars.

Once you realize the possibilities for data-driven digital marketing, it’s time to think of the possibilities of the data you may already have or have access to.

How Dealers, Distributors, and OEMs Can Target Specific Lists of Buyers

You most likely already have data on your current customers in your CRM. Knowing who is a new customer or a repeat customer and which equipment they’ve bought allows you to segment your messaging based on maintenance opportunities, buying cycles, and loyalty.

These additional datasets allow you to go beyond showing ads to the right people at the right time. They allow you to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. Your customer data is already an asset to your business. Using that asset for digital marketing leverages it even further.

However, using your customer data is only part of the equation. What about prospects that haven’t bought from you?

Equipment Buyer Data

Because you want to be in front of people who buy equipment, not just people who buy your equipment, you need data on equipment buyers. Having equipment purchasing histories, current equipment details like brand, model, size, etc. helps you to identify the right future customers for your business and gives you the information needed to target your advertising message.

For example, many lift truck dealers and OEMs subscribe to EDA, a dynamic data platform with 30 years of equipment buying history. That data can be used to target prospects by equipment age, brand loyalty, location, etc. If you have already built prospect lists in EDA, you should be warming up those leads through digital marketing campaigns.

Chances are you have multiple sources of data that can be used to target your digital marketing. The combination allows you not only to maximize the value of your data assets, but to maximize the value of your digital marketing.

Advanced Retargeting Techniques

The utility of data in marketing isn’t relegated to offline lists. Your website is also a powerful source of data for your digital marketing. Visitors to your website can be tagged to be shown your ads later on other websites. This datadriven technique is called retargeting.

It’s a simple concept that can be extremely effective in nurturing your prospects. Once someone visits your website, they see your ads anywhere on the Google Display Network, for instance, The Weather Channel website. If you want to take retargeting a step further, you can look at dynamic retargeting, which automatically customizes the ad content to the content viewed on your website.

Obviously, there are good reasons that digital ad platforms have prioritized the development of data-driven advertising capabilities. They understand the competitive advantage of delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time.

But what is on the horizon for datadriven advertisers?

Using Data-Exchanges to Target Programmatic Ads

While programmatic advertising is more beneficial to large scale marketing organizations, it bears a mention to demonstrate the degree to which data and technological advancements are driving the digital marketing landscape.

Programmatic advertising is use of automated technology to manage multiple components of the digital marketing process including, sourcing data to segment audience, managing placements, and controlling your bids and spend … all in real time. Programmatic can reduce the burden of manually performing a number of tasks needed during the advertising process. Though again, the advantage goes to the datadriven campaigns.

To capitalize on the main advantages of programmatic, efficiency and speed, marketers need to be assured they aren’t efficiently and speedily reaching the wrong audience. Using multiple data sources to power your programmatic targeting is vital to your programmatic success. All of the same data sources that can be leveraged in digital ad platforms can also be leveraged for programmatic.

With all of the data-driven techniques now available and more accessible than ever, it’s easy to see why more and more digital marketing campaigns are data-driven. The advantages of efficiency and precision make it well worth your time to explore the possibilities for your business.

Nick Reid is Senior VP, Digital Services for Randall-Reilly, a marketing services firm for the construction, trucking, truck driver recruiting, agriculture, machine tools and other industries.