People-based marketing — it’s in Merkle’s blood. This marketing philosophy takes personalization to another level, delivering truly unique and tailored customer experiences in real time. While it may be simple to understand, it is not so easy to achieve. Most marketers today aren’t taking the right steps to move toward this holy grail of customer targeting and interaction.

The Way Things Used to Be

Research. Plan. Buy. Cross your fingers. Repeat. This is how marketing used to happen (and still does for some brands today). Separate teams research and target against broad persona assumptions of their buyers. Meanwhile, another team is working on creative while, yet another works on the customer experience aspect, in hopes that everything connects well together. When the campaign goes live, it seems like an accidental experiment as the process is very disjointed.

Adding PII Changes Everything

Adding personally identifiable information (PII) to the mix allows us to challenge the silos and processes that exist in the system described above. PII doesn’t allow you to dismiss research, but rather, to augment it to develop real audiences using real customer data. Once your plan is nourished with this data from the start, you can work from there to build a smarter plan. By using this real data, you can be more thoughtful in your planning process and know what media channels your customers use, thus, making the investment choice of the buying stage simple. Creative, copy, and experience are now also informed by this people-first approach which removes the guess work and makes creative more compelling for customers.

With better data from the start, the data extracted from campaign performance is more reliable and can allow us to tweak even further as future campaigns are executed. You can learn what resonates with your target market and home in on what really speak to those interests.

Want to learn more, or speak to one of our experts about your business challenges? Reach out to us at Marketing@Merkleinc.com.