Customers or data points: what does your brand see?

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Rethinking identity can help brands uncover the human side of their audience and build more meaningful relationships

What does it take to build genuine, long-lasting relationships with your audience?

Getting to know them as real people is a very good place to start. And when I say real people, I’m talking about looking beyond the data to understand the distinct interests and behaviors that tell you who they are, what they care about and what makes them tick.

Of course, traditionally, none of that has been straightforward.

By relying on third-party cookies, brands have only understood their audience’s online activity in a broad sense. Instead of marketing to actual people, they’ve marketed at approximations based on very generalized insights,-based on age, occupation, income, and search history. Suffice to say, that approach has often led to campaigns that don’t always perform as well as they could.

But now, there’s an opportunity to build a far richer picture of your audience that helps you communicate with them in a way that’s more empathetic, targeted and effective. And it all starts by taking a new approach to identity.

How first-party identity helps you grow real relationships

In a post-cookie world, you can’t rely on old approaches to identity. Instead, you need the ability to gather opted-in first-party data, via digital and offline channels, and accurately stitch it all together.

To illustrate why that’s important, let’s consider your typical customers. In the past few weeks, they might have visited your website, dropped by your physical store, signed up for your latest webinar and subscribed to your newsletter. And underneath all that activity, there’ll be more contextual data that lets you see how that whole journey is connected.

Reaching that potential buyer doesn’t require third-party cookies. You just need to connect all the data you already have and use it to answer the most useful questions. What initially drove them to your website? What content did they spend the most time looking at? Did that interaction tell you something about a specific problem they’re trying to solve? If so, what’s the best way to reach out and start helping them?

When you can collect these kinds of insights and accurately tie them to that same customer, you’ll be able to create campaigns and communications that speak to their specific needs and desires. In turn, they’ll be more receptive to what you have to say right now, and more inclined to keep listening to what you say as your relationship evolves.

Identity is a practice, not a product

The cookieless future has arrived. To succeed and stay ahead of competitors, you can’t just rely on a product to connect all your first-party data. You also need an identity strategy that informs your overall decision-making.

Your strategy should help you determine what data is most important to your brand, what data you might be missing, and how to deal with any data gaps that could be impacting your campaigns. Crucially, it should also guide your approach to data management, so you’re always privacy-compliant based on the latest industry regulations.

Creating an identity strategy can be complex and time-consuming, which is where a trusted partner can help.

Acxiom’s Real Identity allows brands to build uniquely powerful relationships by turning data into human truths. And it also gives them access to a team of experts that can create an identity strategy that delivers consistently better customer experiences.

To find out more, please visit this page.

Originally published on Business Reporter