Challenge:

Large auto motors manufacturer continues to enjoy year on year growth through the development of highly efficient, affordably priced new gasoline and electric powered automobiles.

With the advancement of audience technology platforms, brands are increasingly looking to run a business-driven audience strategy, have the technical knowledge of the platforms combined with a data-driven mindset to activate the data itself.

The challenge the auto motors manufacturer faced was to connect customer experiences with business outcomes in an increasingly complex technology and data driven landscape. We found that audience strategy is the golden thread that binds everything together.

As such, the manufacturer and Merkle identified audience strategies based on the manufacturer's 3-step customer experience in order to connect customer experiences with business goals: near market, in-market, and owner relationships. This approach requires a deep level of experience and understanding of the consumer journey, digital data, marketing and audience technologies, advertising, and advanced analytics.  

Approach:

Auto motors manufacturer and Merkle used audience strategies to connect customer needs and business needs.

Stage I: Near Market: Prospecting Audience Expansion

We selected a seed audience for effective prospecting expansion and built the prospecting lookalike models based on this selected audience. We then overlapped the lookalikes with 3rd party data of cookies who are in-market for a new car. These lookalike cookies allowed us to identify potential clients  that mirror similar behavior as our existing customers, and 3rd praty data helps find those who are in the market for a car. Lastly, we deduped people who are already in other retargeting segments, e.g. recent buyers or visited our sites, to ensure our segments did not bid with each other. This resulted in an expansion of our universe by 10x than when we first began the process.

Stage II: In-market: Accurate Audience Targeting

We turned a generic acquisition targeting strategy into an accurate and holistic segmentation by leveraging the SF Audience Studio (DMP) across 3 use cases: suppression, frequency capping, and analytics. The DMP allowed us to drive success with known users, save media budget, and generate insight. Through suppression, the DMP stopped the bleeding of wasted media spending immediately. It also gave us the ability to do frequency capping on a global level across multiple segments/products and prevent overexposure from occurring. SF Audience Studio coupled with our site analytics provided great insight into our best clients.

Stage III: Owner Relationship: Cross-channel Identification and Activation

The objective was to retain owner relationships through personalized service and support by using 3rd party owner data to strengthen owner identification and relationship. By combining 3rd party data with 1st party manufacturer  owner data we were then able to target them with relevant messages via cross-channels, digital channels, display, search, social, website etc.