Faster, better and cheaper: Building audiences for activation with your brand tracker
Marketers often overlook how brand tracking surveys can be used to build fully permissioned data sets of exactly the kinds of consumers they want to reach.
Brand health trackers are incredibly valuable tools for understanding and guiding strategy, but not many advertisers realize that they can also use trackers for building and delivering high-value audiences to get their messages out to consumers.
Trackers are typically population surveys which are fielded continuously throughout the year (although some are more sporadic) and generate a wealth of knowledge that can be used for data-driven decision making. Brand health trackers – sometimes called brand equity trackers – are surveys that ask the population of interest questions around the use, awareness, consideration and intentions about the brand, as well as respondents’ feelings and attitudes. They also ask those same questions about competitor brands in order to create a better understanding of the marketplace.
These trackers are often conducted on behalf of brands by market research agencies, although there has been a bit of a movement in recent years in which brands are increasingly running them in-house. Because the surveys are fielded over time, they also allow brands to understand how their target audience’s perceptions are changing and how actions or events in the marketplace are impacting their brand’s equity.
Use in building segments
As powerful as brand health trackers can be, there is one use case that tends to be overlooked. Over time, brand health trackers build up large volumes of respondent data that can be used to create segments, or otherwise find important target groups against which media campaigns can be activated. Typically, advertisers, or agencies on their behalf, will look externally to find proxy audiences for activation. Most often in the industry, these are either selected from lists of available target groups sold on a syndicated basis to anyone that wants to use them, or are custom made for the advertiser based on additional research.
Audiences for media activation can be selected from commercially available predetermined lists which can provide some increased ROI at good value, but may not be the most effective choices for advertisers with brand trackers. These syndicated activation targets generally provide only a ‘closest fit’ match to the advertiser’s needs as a result of selecting from the options provided.
These audiences are intentionally somewhat broad, so that they are widely useful in the marketplace, and therefore not uniquely tailored to any particular brand’s needs. Further, these off-the-shelf activation targets are used by multiple advertisers within the same brand category and, as a result, may dilute your message in the noise created by all of those brands trying to reach exactly the same consumers.
Using a brand’s own tracker data to create audiences both differentiates them from other voices in the market, and ensures they are talking to exactly the kinds of consumers they want to persuade.
Bespoke activation targets have the potential to be much more effective, but naturally carry a much higher cost because of the need for primary research to create new custom segments tailored to their goals. These activation targets based on custom research also take a substantial amount of time to develop.
For advertisers with brand trackers, there may be no need to take on the additional time and expenses of primary research, nor to rely on commercially available segments: their brand tracker most likely already contains all the data needed to create custom audiences specifically tailored to their brand.
For example, imagine an FMCG brand looking to expand market share. An ideal audience might be individuals who use the product category, but do not use the brand’s products, and express an interest in trying new things. Those are all characteristics identifiable in a well-written brand tracker.
As another example, consider a telecom company looking to reduce churn. They might have an ad campaign built around coverage or quality of service, which they would want to put in front of their consumers who have negative impressions of their service. They may also want to deliver that message to an audience of users of competitive services with negative views of their current provider’s quality.
Using a brand’s own tracker data to create audiences both differentiates them from other voices in the market, and ensures they are talking to exactly the kinds of consumers they want to persuade.
First-party data
The key to taking advantage of your tracker to quickly build high-value audiences without additional primary research is to use a fully-permissioned first-party provider for your survey sample. This is vital because only first-party survey data providers will have the access to their respondents’ personal data that is necessary to scale lookalike audiences from them.
Further, that first-party relationship is also required to get permission for this use case in a transparent way. Starting with this foundation, it becomes possible to create high-value audiences for activation by selecting subsets of your tracker sample that define the segments you want to message.
Building your own custom audiences from your brand tracker surveys provides the best of all worlds: delivering high ROI audiences tailored to the brand’s specific needs without the dilution found in commercially available audiences, or without creating the additional costs and time delays associated with primary research for new audiences. There’s a saying that when it comes to faster, better, cheaper, you can only ever get two of the three. By using the brand tracker data which you already collect to create custom audiences, you can finally get all three.
For more information on Dynata’s Data Activation solution, click here.
Steven Millman is head of global research and data science at Dynata.