Julian Mossanen
David Coverdale of Whitesnake once sang the words, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I sure know where I’ve been,” in reference to feeling uncertain on life’s path. Marketers deal with this issue in their struggle to understand where customers are going as well. But, instead of vying to wander down the only road they’ve ever known, marketers in the digital age have the technology that allows them to not only see where customers have been, but use that knowledge to effectively determine where they are going.
This knowledge is at the heart of intent marketing, and its growth is poised to mark a significant shift in digital advertising.
Intent marketing is fundamentally the practice of determining what a customer might want and then preemptively offering it to them. The practice, in its most basic forms, has been around since people first started trying to sell things to each other. Observant salespeople would notice certain characteristics of customers and try to sell them relevant items. Someone would go to a fishing village to advertise and sell their ropes, or go to a farming community and advertise that they have the most fertile manure. Salespeople did this because they knew that people will respond more to items that are relevant to their experience. Fishermen need ropes, farmers need fertilizer.
As marketing became more consumer-focused, the techniques for trying to understand the customer mindset similarly became more sophisticated. Initially, companies would send out surveys and pollsters to gain insights into customer interests, with questions asking what kind of products and services they are more likely to use and what they find useful. Then market researchers began turning to focus groups to gain a more personal look into the customer thought process and better establish consumer profiles based on the answers and feedback they would receive.
These methods would work relatively well for their intended purposes, but they all relied on customers being completely honest and open with their answers. When dealing with people, this is something one must always be wary of. Marketers longed for that holy grail of gaining truly honest information that could be used to accurately predict customer preferences and intentions. This holy grail came along with the rise of personal computers and web browsing.
With the tools that internet technology provided them with, marketers became able to track where customers browsed, what they browsed for and what content they engaged with. This insight is extremely valuable because it isn’t the murky waters of what customers think might be relevant, it is the direct evidence of what they clicked on. By using this strategy, digital marketers are able to relay ads to customers based on what’s known to be relevant to them in real-time.
This power to target and retarget customers in real-time has proven to be invaluable and has opened the door to a whole new world of genuine ad experiences. In the past, intent marketing was limited to using data such as search history and click history. This would cause many digital marketing campaigns to provide customers with ads that were only barely relevant (i.e. you searched for those shoes for a vacation that you’ve since been on, yet the retargeting continues). This kind of data decay wasn’t doing marketing teams any favors.
Now, however, marketing campaigns can be aided by the use of detailed behavioral metrics such as how long a user stays on a site or how often they engage with certain kinds of ads. This critical data can then be used with RTB and retargeting technology to analyze and optimize campaigns in real time and provide customers with ads that are up to date with the latest information. This enables a fluid and extremely relevant ad experience for customers and a much more successful campaign for marketers.
Because these ads are becoming more relevant to their experiences and needs, customers are coming to embrace the use of research technology such as cookies. They know that the use of these techniques, along with the appropriate metrics and data, allows their browsing experience to be much more fluid and enjoyable (i.e. because you looked at some camping gear, you may want to look at other camp-related equipment).
Intent marketing has come along way. The onset of programmatic advertising is only furthering the degree of relevancy that today’s ads have. This technology enables marketers to create user profiles that are both extremely comprehensive and anonymous, allowing them to generate ads that are very relevant and get them to the right people at the right time without seeming “creepy”. In this capacity, programmatic has helped to bring intent marketing to a new peak and enabled marketers to get as close as possible to the holy grail of advertising. With programmatic being adopted by so many platforms at such a fast rate, intent marketing is poised to reach even greater heights and marketers may just be able to grab that elusive grail.
Julian Mossanen is regional vice-president, buyer cloud at Rubicon Project
