Unique Marketing Point (UMP) And What Advertisers Are Missing

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi. Thanks ever so much for coming to watch our Koozai TV channel today. I want to talk to you about your UMP. And what do I mean by UMP? UMP, for me, is your unique marketing point. And I think as advertisers, we don’t play on this enough.

So we see so many businesses talking about your USP and what can we do to try and differentiate ourselves in a crowded marketplace. And that’s all great, and I think that’s still very important. But your unique marketing point, for me, is your data. So the visitors that come in to your website belong to you. Any CRM data that you’ve got belongs to you– your Facebook channels, any bit where you’re collecting data, you’re collecting insights on visitors that come and interact with any of your platforms that belongs to you.

And the reason that it’s unique is your competitors can’t replicate it. It completely belongs to you, and it is yours to do with as you wish. And I think we really need to start playing on this a little bit more.

So in this video, I want to talk to you about four platforms that give us a lot of insight into who our audiences are, I want to give you a couple of action points to take away and go and implement cross-channel marketing from today onwards.

So let’s get started. So we’re going to start by looking at the different tools. So the first tool is Google Analytics. Now, most businesses have got a Google Analytics profile. What businesses fail to do within Google Analytics is go and enable the demographic and audience data that you can obtain from that platform.

So within the Audience section within the reporting and analytics, you can go in there, click on Demographics, and click into Age, and it gives you an option to enable that report. And you can start collecting that kind of demographic data around your audience that’s coming into your website.

So the type of insights that we can get from Google Analytics– we can start to understand the age of our visitors, the gender. We can also start to understand the types of content that they browse across the web, so all of the different websites that they go on. Google will segment that data, and pull that back in, and say this type of audience is a fan of movies, travel, education, whatever it is that your audience is into.

Google Analytics will also tell you the types of products or services that your customer base are also in market for. So you can start to understand if they’re in market for a holiday, a new car, a new job, even. Google will give you all of this insight once you’ve enabled these reports.

So moving on from there, Google Adwords– if you are running an Adwords campaign, you can start to see a lot of insight into your customers off the back of where they are actually clicking and the types of ads that they’re clicking on. So you can see the age, the gender, but you can also see parental status and device from within Adwords as well.

Now, also in Adwords, if you’ve built up any remarketing lists in Google Analytics, these will automatically get imported into Adwords. And from within Adwords, you can see that affinity data, so the types of content that your customers like, types of products that they’re in market for. But you can actually see this broken down at a more granular level. So you can start to see– rather than just that they’re in market for travel, you can start to see that at a much more detailed level to give you a bit more of an insight into your customer base.

Next up, we’ve got the Bing Ads Intelligence tool. Now, this tool is a really cool tool that’s been around for a while, but so many people aren’t using it. So it’s just an Excel plug-in that you can put into your Microsoft Excel program. You can put in a list of keywords that your customers may potentially be searching for, and then you can highlight all of those, and you can start to understand the marketplace that you’re competing in.

So let’s say, for example, we’re a life insurance brand, and we put in three or four or five keywords that are related to life insurance. What we can do within this tool is we can actually understand the whole of the UK, and we can start to say people that are searching for these set of keywords, how old are they typically. What brackets do they fall in? What gender are they? And you can start to really get a feel for who your customer base are, but on a nationwide level rather than just looking at your own data.

And then finally, Facebook, which is the absolute queen of data. Facebook has so much insight into our customers. And as soon as you’ve got a pixel added on to your web site, Facebook will start to track anybody that’s already logged into a Facebook account. And they will give you, as an advertiser, insights into that audience, even if you’re not doing any form of paid advertising with Facebook at present.

So in Facebook, we can start to see all of the standard demographic information, like the age, the gender, marital status. We can also drill down into education level. We can see the types of content that they like, the types of pages that they like, the location. If you’re based in the US as well, you can get extra insight into those customers.

So you can start to see things like average household income, the type of car they’re in market for. Facebook know a huge amount about us, and we should really be starting to pay attention to the data that we can obtain from that and actually use that withing our different marketing channels.

So that’s four platforms. We’ve also go other platforms, like LinkedIn and Pinterest and Twitter, that also give us some insight into who our audience are as well. So those aren’t to be missed. But these are four of my favorite at the moment.

When it comes to actions– so if we’re using any of these platforms to give us insight into who our customer is, we need to make sure we’re updating our privacy policy. That’s rule number one. You need to be telling people that come on to your web site how you’re using cookie data and what you’re actually going to use that for. So that’s really, really important that you go and update your privacy policy before you start putting all of the code on the site and actually tracking what your audience are.

Following on from that, you need to get all of the pixels, so each of these platforms bar the Intelligence Tool there. All of the different platforms will give you a specific pixel that you need to place on every single page of your web site.

Once you’ve done that, you can then start building out different audiences. Especially within Facebook and Google Analytics, you can start to say, OK, I want to break down the audience that come into my website by different sections. That might be the different products that you sell or the different services that you sell.

And you can build out custom audiences to try and compare this product versus this product. How do these two audiences differ in terms of demographic? How can I market to those people differently? So that’s your audience segmentation So that’s really important to get all of that insight together to really understand who the visitors are that are coming into your website and how you can use that to market to them differently.

Once you’ve done this, building out personas is a great way of helping people that are marketing your business, whether that’s internal resource or external resource, to really understand who is it that I’m marketing to. Who is it that’s actually buying my product? You can take all of this insight and try to build out a few personas of people that you want to target to help people visualize and represent the people that you’re trying to reach and make everybody on a level playing field so they know who they’re trying to market to.

And then finally, once we understand all of this insight, this is great. We can use all of this targeting. We can use all of this insight that we’ve gathered within our paid media campaigns. But not only that. You can use that across different marketing channels.

So you might be able to understand the types of newspapers you want to target, the types of websites you want to put adverts on. You might think, OK, my customers are interested in this type of magazine. Why don’t we put an offline ad in there and see how that performs?

Likewise, if you’re doing any kind of TV advertising, you can look and say, OK, this audience are really interested in this type of program. Why don’t we place an advert after that program? Because we know that that’s the video and the TV content that our audience like to consume.

So once you’re using all this data to your advantage, this is your UMP. And this is where, I think, as advertisers, we can really start to push ahead of our competitors and really make use of the data that we’ve got in our cross-channel marketing.

So key takeaways– make sure that you update your privacy policy. Go and sign up for all these ad accounts and get the pixels added across your web site, and then make sure that you’re actually using that data to really understand who your audience are.

Thanks ever so much for listening. If you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Thank you.