Once you understand your customers, you can start to move beyond a transactional relationship and look to engage them more broadly with your brand. To do this, you have to demonstrate to them that you can add value or can help them meet a need or desire. Otherwise, the relationship will be very one sided. Just ask Steve.

The question often though is where to start. The issue that a lot of digital marketers face is that current insights into their web visitors are limited to what their web analytics tools can tell them. Such insights are limited at best as they are entirely based on the information you collect about them from your own site.

Finding ways to plug that gap is key. Data doesn’t have all of the answers, but it does have a lot. Especially audience data, which is anonymised data linked to a specific user by a cookie, because it collects millions of data points when users are visiting and interacting with other websites. As a result it removes blindfolds, empowering a brand to know who its consumers are, what they’re interested in, and what/when they’re purchasing.

Armed with this knowledge, brands can take a good look at the products and services they offer and identify innovative new ways of enhancing the relationships they have with customers. For example, if a footwear site knows half of its shoppers are skateboarding enthusiasts, it might feature skate shoes on the homepage instead of high heels. Inviting a well-known skateboarder to be a guest curator, forging new partnerships with specialty brands, and reviewing inventory to ensure what is offered, ignites interest and adds value to target audiences are all possibilities with such insight. If 70 per cent of the site’s customers are women it may seek to amend its proposition accordingly.

Audience data empowers companies to treat their audiences as individual humans and demonstrate that they’ve taken the time to understand their likes and dislikes. This goes a long way to engendering the sorts of warm fuzzy feelings on which long term relationships are based.

 

By Kevin Tan, CEO of Eyeota. 

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