For marketers, reaching the right customer at the right time with the right message is an eternal challenge. The rise of digital advertising and mobile devices has provided more opportunities than ever to target consumers, but it’s also brought an avalanche of ads that buyers increasingly tune out as noise.
One marketing technology company, InMarket, believes it has cracked the code on cutting through the clutter with a data-driven, real-time approach to understanding audiences and delivering hyper-relevant messaging the moment someone is primed to make a purchase decision.
“The secret sauce when it comes to attracting and retaining new customers is being able to understand their ‘why’ or what’s motivating them, and when and where to best reach them,” says Michael Della Penna, InMarket’s chief strategy officer. “It’s no longer enough to rely on superficial characteristics about your audiences to inform your marketing campaigns. Consumers want relevant, personalized experiences that directly address their needs, and in order to bring those experiences to life, you need to understand those driving motivations.”
InMarket has built a platform aimed at doing exactly that, leveraging intent, location, and purchasing data to anticipate what items consumers actually buy. Della Penna explains the company’s solutions are grounded in the “four A’s” of marketing: analytics, audiences, activation, and attribution.
Analytics: Discovering the ‘Why’ Behind Consumer Behavior
The first “A” in InMarket’s framework is analytics aimed at uncovering profound insights into what truly motivates different consumer segments to make purchases.
“We go beyond the ‘who,’ which is the traditional approach to marketing. Historically, marketers have focused on superficial characteristics that don’t provide deep enough insight to fuel the truly personalized, relevant ad experiences modern consumers are looking for,” says Della Penna. “We help clients overcome that challenge by leveraging unique data and [artificial intelligence] to discover what matters so brands can form stronger connections.”
Combing intent (what people say they will do), visitation (where people go), and transactional (what people buy) insights, InMarket helps unearth shifts in consumer behavior: who is at risk of churning, what is their loyalty across the category, and which competitors are vulnerable and ripe for conquesting to grow share. “Going beyond the traditional insight to zero in to discover what matters and drill into what insights are actionable is increasingly critical in today’s highly competitive market. InMarket’s unique data combined with AI helps brands discover those insights and allows brands to better connect with their customers and prospects to cultivate loyalty and long-term relationships,” says Della Penna.
Audiences: Using AI To Build and Reach Precise Customer Segments
With rich consumer insights in hand from the analytics phase, InMarket can then leverage AI to build targeted audience segments and predictive models aimed at pinpointing the highest-value prospects and proactively reaching them. This includes going beyond just “who” to target but developing rich audience segments leveraging thousands of data points including demographic, psychographic, campaign, transactional data to understand “why” consumers shop and what motivates them.
“We offer marketers the opportunity to not only target users, but also fine-tune messaging through a deeper understanding of what motivates them — are they chiefly motivated by value and discounts, or are they health- and ingredient-conscious,” says Della Penna. “Not all shoppers are alike, and although they may be at the same store, understanding shoppers at a deeper level allows marketers to personalize the content and offer greater discounts or highlight the nutritional benefits of a product in the message to better connect with those motivational factors.”
Machine learning and AI-driven predictive audience solutions are also driving greater success for marketers. “AI and predictive audiences leverage historical patterns and machine learning and enable marketers to not only reach those right customers, but do so at the right time, just prior to their next shopping trip,” says Della Penna. “Marketing in 2024 for consumers is about personalization, and for marketers it’s about getting the most for your buck. In order to do both, creating custom audiences that encompass those customers who will be the most receptive and find the most value out of your ad experience is essential.”
Della Penna cites InMarket’s Preceptivity product as an example. It analyzes historical patterns to determine the optimal time to serve a targeted ad that can prompt someone to pick up specific items on their next shopping trip.
For example, if Saturday mornings are frequent grocery shopping days for a target audience, a retailer or CPG brand can ensure those ads are reaching their key customers the day before or early that morning to remain top of mind.
These AI-powered audience segments and predictions allow brands to take a proactive approach, seeding awareness and consideration ahead of time.
Activation: Delivering Relevant Messaging in the Moment
The third “A,” activation, is perhaps where InMarket’s capabilities stand out from others in the martech ecosystem. The company is able to deliver the right message at the right time by activating hyper-personalized advertising on a consumer’s smartphone the instant they enter or approach a relevant retail location.
“We have a real-time activation product that’s pretty unique in the marketplace in that we can wake up a digital mobile phone as a consumer’s walking into a physical location and serve up an offer,” explains Della Penna.
Through this Moments platform, InMarket has developed what Della Penna calls “the highest performing digital marketing ad unit that you can buy in the industry.”
These ads can even incorporate multimedia interactive experiences like shoppable video, virtual try-ons, and gamified experiences.
“We typically have click-through rates on that ad unit that are six times higher than the industry mobile benchmark, and we’re pretty proud of that,” says Della Penna. “It outperforms display marketing, it outperforms traditional mobile, it outperforms email, it outperforms any other digital search or digital marketing that you can do.”
Attribution: Measuring Performance To Optimize Campaigns
The final “A” in InMarket’s model is attribution, which involves precisely measuring the incremental impact of its marketing campaigns before, during, and after a campaign.
“Clicks or impressions aren’t enough to understand the true impact of campaigns nowadays. Marketers need to be sure those clicks on a mobile ad or views on a social media promotion are actually resulting in sales and driving growth for the brand,” says Della Penna. “To do that, marketers must analyze Brand, Visit and Sales Lift together to understand the true effectiveness of their ads in both driving awareness and inspiring purchases.”
The attribution insights then feed back into the analytics phase, informing future audience targeting, creative messaging, and activation strategies in a continuous optimization cycle.
“Each campaign is informing the next, whether it’s audience building, activation tactics or channels, or upleveling your measurement infrastructure, and then you learn again,” says Della Penna.
This attribution cycle is crucial for ensuring marketing spend is optimized and quickly recognizing and eliminating so-called “waste” on tactics that don’t move the needle. Della Penna claims InMarket’s platform “has proven to help marketers eliminate media waste up to 94%, which can have significant impacts on the bottom line for marketers crunching each dollar.”
InMarket’s mastery of these four A’s of analytics, audiences, activation, and attribution, Della Penna believes, empowers brands to transcend outdated marketing practices and “sense and respond to consumers’ needs in real time, including what motivates them — why they shop, alongside when and where to best reach them.”
And in today’s overcrowded advertising landscape of infinite choice but fractured attention spans, understanding and reaching consumers and going beyond traditional approaches. By leveraging unique data and insights and real-time technology, marketers can transition to modern marketing by going beyond the who to target and shifting to the focus to better understand why they shop, and when and where to best reach them. That is not only a game changer, but also an opportunity to stand out from the noise and differentiate one’s brand by bringing more value to the brand/consumer relationship in the moments that matter.
