It’s no secret that consumers are becoming harder to reach with ads. In fact, a fifth of people avoid all types of advertising, meaning brands need to be even more strategic with their ad planning in order to succeed.
To navigate this tricky terrain and drive ROI from online advertising, brands need on-demand insights more than ever. But for data to become an integral part of every ad campaign, it needs to work hard, and deliver tangible results.
Simply having the data isn’t enough to guarantee success. In reality, it doesn’t matter how great your data is if you don’t know how to use it. So, what does it actually take to turn data into action?
1. Embed it into your workflows
Syncing your audience data into your ad platforms is a foolproof way to ensure your ads are going to the right audiences. Our ad platforms integration provides a direct path from identifying an audience, to activating ad campaigns.
Simply build your audience and plug it in across your chosen ad platforms.
Not only does it give you a greater level of control over your ads by allowing you to retain the level of detail and granularity in your research, but it also saves time and removes manual error. Anyone in your team can create an audience and push it into a new or existing ad campaign, ready to be used.
Our ad platforms integration is in beta, and available to all GWI users across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok, Google, YouTube, and more.
2. Create a single source of truth
Shared access to consistent data for all key stakeholders is an important way to align teams, ensuring all activity is tied to your core objectives. It provides a clear focus for all teams and a single source of truth to base business decisions on.
Often, research is conducted by one person and utilized by another, meaning audiences have to be manually replicated, so they’re never quite the same. For instance, a researcher may build an audience and pass it over to the digital ads team to activate. They then have to build a replica of the audience within the ads platform, based on their interpretation of the audience provided. While it’ll likely be similar, it’s not the same audience.
In the GWI platform, you can create audiences that can be shared across your business and pushed consistently to ad platforms, ensuring no key insights are lost during your end to end processes, and all teams are working from the same, consistent data.
3. Keep it fresh
Actionable data needs to reflect current trends and attitudes. Only with fresh data can stakeholders uncover new insights about their audience and leverage them to boost their strategy. It’s the key to driving agile and effective marketing campaigns – especially in fast-moving markets like travel and fashion.
A clothing retailer may run ads on a particular style of clothing based on what’s trending at the time for their Gen Z audience, but styles can go out of favor as quickly as they come in. Having access to a regularly updated data set allows businesses to keep a pulse on trends, and understand what will resonate with their audience best.
That’s why we offer our monthly data release, GWI Zeitgeist to all existing users, at no additional cost.
These steps will help businesses create truly data-led campaigns that resonate with their audience – at a time when consumers are radically rethinking their spending habits.