How to leverage data for audience targeting and increased campaign effectiveness

In today's competitive market, understanding and effectively targeting your audiences is crucial for the success of any marketing campaign. Leveraging data for audience targeting can significantly enhance campaign efficiency and drive better results.

This article delves into the key aspects of leveraging data for audience targeting:

• Planning audiences rather than channels
• Using data to define the right audiences
• Choosing modelling partners and addressable channels
• Creating lookalike audiences to provide reach
• Other ways to connect insights and activation
• Buying audiences and measuring campaign success
• Audience targeting with YouGov

Gaining a deep understanding of their audiences is essential for brands, agencies and media owners. Research data has always been one of the cornerstones of audience analyses done by agencies and the brands they work for, but with the rise of programmatic advertising and more addressable media channels, it doesn’t have to stop with understanding audiences anymore.

Marketers want to go beyond just insights; connecting panel data to the ad tech ecosystem facilitates using the same data for addressable advertising, closing the gap between planning and activation.

Audience marketing plays a crucial role in building deeper connections with the consumer base. By leveraging both qualitative data and quantitative data, brands can better understand and identify their target audience, which in turn enhances the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

When marketers focus on audience targeting rather than just channels, they can deliver a more relevant marketing message that resonates with their audience. This approach not only helps in defining the difference between affinity and in-market audiences but also allows brands to tap into in-market audiences more effectively. By understanding the distinct characteristics and preferences of these groups, marketers can tailor their campaigns to increase customer engagement and drive better results.

Planning audiences rather than channels

Over the last few years, many traditional media channels have created options for marketers to target specific audiences.

It started with online display and video ads but soon spread to formerly linear channels such as TV, OOH and radio. This shift is due to more devices being connected to the internet and the clever application of various data sources to predict where and when to find a specific audience.

With the rise of AI, even more sophisticated applications will create more options. This development fosters the emphasis on audience marketing & planning and makes detailed channel planning less relevant. It’s more about defining the right audience than finding the exact channel and program to reach them.

Programmatic advertising, appropriate targeting and programmatic creative can be solutions to the challenges above, ensuring a brand gets in front of the right target audience, raises attention, send a relevant marketing message to increase customer engagement, and creates interest in the brand or product.

Using data to define the right audiences

But how does one create “right” audience? Understanding your target audience(s) requires using the right data, and defining the right audience should never be done based on a gut feeling but needs a profound basis.

This can include any first-party data a brand may have. More recently, brands have started realizing the importance of their first party data. They know better than anyone what their customers are doing and how they are behaving in their owned environments.

However, away from owned environments, most brands have little or no data - there are gaps in their knowledge. This is where third-party datasets, such as YouGov’s industry-leading panel data, come in. Third-party data can fill gaps and offer a rich and complete 360-degree view of consumer behaviour, situation, attitude and opinion.

Using high quality data from both first-party and third-party sources allows brands to distinguish between current customers and prospects and create different sub-groups of both.

The ideal target audience for a campaign also depends on the campaign objective, whether it is to raise awareness for a new brand or product, educate about a new feature, smell or flavour of an existing product, or run a performance campaign with the goal of immediate sales. Depending on the industry, this might look different.

YouGov works with advertisers and their agencies across many verticals, from media and content to retail and sports. There are standard socio-demographic audiences that work well across multiple verticals, as well as granular sector audiences.

We also provide audiences segmented by life stage in the last or next 12 months, such as graduating from college or buying a house. But where we have seen our clients to be most successful is when we create unique and exclusive audiences for their specific needs and campaign objectives. This ensures a more precise approach to audience marketing and enhances the likelihood of campaign success.

Here are just a few examples of how over 1000 clients have used YouGov Audience Data:

• Jewellery brands targeting those getting married soon
• Charity organisations targeting affluent audiences
• Global credit card providers reaching their competitors’ current customers
• Streaming platforms finding their own customers across paid media
• Telecommunication companies target tech early adopters

When working with brands and agencies, defining the audiences can often start from scratch, but in many cases, they also have existing segmentations or frameworks they like to use as a starting point and refine for the campaign-specific needs.

Once the ideal audience is defined and analysed in more detail, the next step is to close the gap between planning and activation and bring a planning audience into the digital advertising ecosystem.

Choose modelling partners and addressable channels

Once the audiences are defined, they need to be connected to modelling partners or platforms, depending on which media channels should be used as part of the campaign.

YouGov’s partners with companies like Eyeota, semasio and LiveRamp that provide reach and connectivity into addressable media channels, enabling us to generate additional value beyond insights for our clients and make our audiences useable for targeting across various addressable channels. Those partners create lookalike audiences and facilitate YouGov audiences to be distributed across a range of different media channels and buying platforms, including Facebook, The Trade Desk or Google. Formerly traditional media channels such as TV or OOH can also be connected with these audiences.

Creating lookalike audiences to provide reach

Lookalike audiences use YouGov data as a basis to find statistical twins. The modelling partners look for what the YouGov audience has in common with other users in their datasets, that differentiates it from the rest of the population.

These models are then used to identify statistical twins of the original YouGov panel-based audience, while choosing the trade-off between affinity and reach. Some clients prefer a high reach audience for an awareness campaign, while others look for high affinity audiences for the most precise targeting; some combine both and optimize throughout the campaign.

Other ways to connect insights and activation

Another approach to bring audiences from the research and insights world into the digital advertising ecosystem is to use attributes that are common in both datasets, often referred to as proxy or attribute matches between the two datasets you are looking at. These attributes or hooks can be simple demographics, specific segmentations or location information that can be used to translate audiences from planning into activation datasets.

This approach may not be as precise, but it’s simple, quick and very privacy friendly. Using location or geo data can be another way to look at audiences and how they are distributed in smaller geographic units. For some channels, such as TV or OOH, this provides a very useful route into those distribution networks.

Buying audiences and measuring campaign success

Finally, the audiences are bought as part of the campaign execution. Ideally, it is not only the audience and media channel choice that is set up to resonate with the campaign goal and audience, but also the creative, timing and narrative that creates interest in the brand or product. If all of these factors play together and the setup is optimized continuously, the success of the campaign just has to be measured appropriately.

Audience targeting with YouGov

YouGov’s advertising solutions make sure your ads are delivered to your target consumers every time, thanks to powerful audience segmentation scaled from YouGov’s 27 million + strong panel.

• Better first party data: Enhance your first-party data by collecting new consumer data with innovative ad technology. Import YouGov data for expanded insights and audience targeting, building a richer data asset with consumers interested in your products.

Build ad campaigns that reach your audience at the right time, in the right place.

If you enjoyed reading this, take a look below at some additional resources we thought you might like:

• 8 steps to create an ideal customer persona
• How to test marketing messaging & ad creative with your audience