How do you use data you already have in your business to help your online marketing? (2 minute read)

You’re collecting emails, first names, last names, addresses and mobile phone numbers.

Your tracking devices and visitors to your website.
You know who your best customers are.

Great!

And in this ‘data-led’ world, you probably know you should be using all of the information you’ve collected to help your digital marketing efforts – to get in front of the right types of clients.

But how do you do this?
How this information be effectively used?
And where do you start?

Well, a few months ago my brother Andrew and I were asked to put a presentation together on this very topic for the inaugural NZ Tech Marketers Conference, which launched in Auckland. And a few companies you may have heard of where there, such as Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Uber, Datacom, Endace, Fonterra, Beca, IBM …

Feed The Beast!

We themed our talk ‘Feeding The Beast’, where ‘The Beast’ includes Facebook Ads and Google Ads platforms.

These systems are hungry for an enormous amount of data as well as digital assets (like banners, articles, content etc). The more information you can provide the beast, the more the beast learns to help you to get more targeted with your advertising.

Over time, the information helps enhance ad performance, reducing manual, every-day campaign optimisation tasks that a person would normally do. There is simply no way a human can compete with an intelligent machine.

What can you do to help feed the beast for your business?

#1 Always start with a goal

Don’t forget the basics of any good marketing campaign – goal setting!

You need to feed the beast with good instructions and tell the beast your goal – you need to tell it what it is trying to achieve or it will not know how to use the data properly.

What metrics will you need to identify to progress towards more conversions?

Do you want to sprint 100m like Usain Bolt?
Do you want to throw a shot put like Tom Walsh?
Or do you want to pole vault like Elisa McCartney?

Each of the above requires different goal setting, training, different regimes, different coaches, and more.

It’s the same with machine learning – you need to be clear about what you’re wanting to achieve, you need to give the beast direction.

Here are some examples of different conversion types:

#2 Instruct the Google Beast

When you create a new Google Ads campaign, the beast is super helpful and guides you towards choosing your goal:

You’ll need to help it out here by ensuring you have a smart bidding strategy and conversion feedback so it can learn like a kid putting a puzzle piece in the slot. (Need Help?).

Tip: the Beast is often hungry and requires sufficient data and some time to learn so be patient with it.

#3 Instruct the Facebook Beast

Similar to Google Ads, when you set up a campaign, tell the Facebook Beast what your objective is. This is one of the first things you need to do when you set up a new Facebook campaign so that you can take advantage of inbuilt machine learning intelligence.

#4 Set Up Pixel Tracking

How does the Beast know when it has achieved your goal?

This might be straightforward when the goal is to get more clicks, but what if the goal is to fill out a form, buy your t-shirt, visit your store or make a phone call?

You need to set up a tracking system to ping back to Google or Facebook when your off-platform goal is achieved. That’s where pixels come in – a small piece of tracking code.

Here are some example codes for each platform. In their basic form, they will let the Beast know when a user has viewed your page, but you’ll most likely need to enhance them to push more custom events such as form completions, video views etc. (Need Help?)

#5 What Can I Feed My Beast?

There are People, Devices, Creative…the menu is extensive!

You can feed the Beast audience data collected, like these examples:

Interests & Content Consumption
Life Events
In-Market
Affinities
Keywords
Customer Email Lists
Website Lookalikes
Remarketing Lists
Email Database Lookalikes
3rd Party Data Segments
App Downloads
Competition Entries
Website Behaviours e.g. Time On Site, Engagement, Events
Micro Conversion Data
Placements

You can feed the Beast assets, like these:

Banners & Creative
Ad Formats
Ad Copy
Landing Pages
CTA Messages

Plus other information like this you can feed the Beast too:

Likes & Community Engagement/Comments
Gender
Age
Devices
Browsers
Location
Time of Day

#Tip: Make sure you mix and match as it’s important to test.

Where to start?

Keep it simple. You’ll no doubt have customer email lists and are collecting information on your website visitors, so start there. With time you can begin to add more layers of data to help the Beast achieve your goals.

So get started now and start feeding that Beast!

Thanks to the Tech Marketers Group for hosting the event and inviting us to share our work!
For more information on Tech Marketers NZ visit techmarketers.co.nz/conference-2019