Faced with a cookie-less world, companies must ensure that their first party data is as embellished and fleshed out as possible.
This is easy to say, but the reality is a number of brands, especially in the consumer-packaged goods and fast-moving consumer goods segments, don’t own the last mile of relationship with their customers. For them, it’s a continuing struggle to collect first party data that’s actionable from a marketing and advertising perspective.
A recent data overlay project Takealot undertook now brings its clients a lot closer to these consumer insights they so much desire. As a retail media network, Takealot Group Advertising works closely with brands looking to advertise on its platform to reach consumers to buy their products.
It has the consumer behaviour data, and equipped with this helps clients to target the correct audience. However there’s always room for improvement, which happened when Takealot Group Advertising came across the work of Cape Town consultancy Eighty20’s National Segmentation Customer Profiling Tool.
Socio-economic segmentation now incorporated
Eighty20 utilised different local datasets to categorise the South African population into eight segments, 48 sub-segments and 1500 micro-segments. Working together, Takealot Group Advertising overlaid Eighty20’s socio-economic measures on their own customer data.
What this allows is a common language internally to talk about our customer segments and our sub-segments. It gives us substantial insights into these customers but goes further to allow understanding of advertising targeting and the effects of advertising. Who did we mean to target with this advertising and which segment actually went on to purchase? And then there are the sub segments – who do we want to get more from and who do we want to retain?
For Takealot Group Advertising, it’s important to ensure that their customers sell as many products as possible. Its new integration of socio-economic segmentation is about ensuring that advertising now hits the target far more accurately.
This drives customer acquisition in a specific sub-segment and allows us to target them through different mechanisms, not just on platform but also through Takealot Group Advertising’s placement of ads online and on social media, as well as bespoke CRM journeys.
Targeting the moveable middles
Takealot Group Advertising’s strategy of ensuring a clearer understanding of their clients through socio-economic segmentation builds on one of the cornerstones of marketing – knowing your client. But as Sarah Utermark, country director of the MMA South Africa explains, it goes further than this since Takealot Group Advertising’s new laser-focussed advertising allows the targeting of ‘moveable middles’ for far better return on ad spend (ROAS).
The MMA defines moveable middles as open-minded consumers characterised by their mid-range probability of buying the brand. They’re not the person who supports the brand at every turn, but they don’t have anything against the brand. Indeed, they are open to buying the brand and often require a simple push via advertising to help them ‘Add to Cart’.
“The MMA’s studies have shown that drawing up a marketing plan to target this most responsive target audience can outperform traditional reach plans by more than 50% when it comes to ROAS,” notes Utermark. “It shows that yes, you must care for your highly loyal customers who always buy the brand, but by shifting focus away from mass reach to the moveable middle, your advertising is going to be far more effective.”
Enabling more sales
A final aspect of Takealot Group Advertising’s media retail network strategy that serves as an important reminder to marketers. While it’s key to ask the right questions when interrogating your data to glean the correct insights for clients, any further insights must be plugged back into the marketing funnel so that you can get an understanding of where your marketing is guiding you.
Many companies are overlaying data, but what Takealot Group Advertising is doing is adding additional layers of value, which is really going to drive the efficiency of the advertising proposition for our customers. Ultimately, our customers want to sell more, and this data integration is just an enabler of that.
Odette van Wyk is Takealot’s group head of advertising.
