Customer Acquisition with your own Data

In the battle for customer acquisition, data plays an important role in marketing strategy, along with a desired product and excellent creative. There’s also the challenge of reaching a target audience where they spend most of their time, which today is within mobile apps and browsing social media. When we look at Google, Facebook and Amazon from the perspective of an advertiser, we see that they utilize much more data for their own benefit than they make available for audience segmentation.

While numerous data sources are available for targeting across most digital properties, one of the most effective ways brands can target is by bringing their existing opted-in datasets to social media. This frequently provides a competition advantage over the “walled gardens” of the major technology players, as your own data is typically much more relevant to your marketing efforts. The four major sites – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat – all provide advertisers the ability to create custom audiences using their own data, and in some cases to use third-party data sets.

Typically, the most utilized datasets to match against are email addresses, identifiers/tags provided by the social media sites themselves and mobile advertising IDs. Most sites require a minimum of 1,000 records in order to create a custom audience. This is for privacy reasons and to ensure that the segment is large enough to deliver appropriately.

The ability to create custom audiences on social media allows advertisers to reframe many of their existing marketing tactics. They can encourage repeat visits, whether in-store or online, from existing customers, or try to win shoppers from competitive locations. Brands without physical locations that seek to go directly to the consumer can use custom audiences to reach their market on social media as well. Most sites also allow advertisers to create “lookalike” audiences to help increase the scale of the campaign. They look for common characteristics from the audience you’ve uploaded and find similar consumers for your campaign to reach.

Aside from being able to reach a relevant audience, bringing your own data to a social media site can also result in performance improvements and cost savings. Using own opted-in data sets will become an increasingly important tactic for the marketer’s overall customer acquisition strategy to achieve that goal.