My mother-in-law has a great expression.  In the family we call it, “updating your prior.”  What it means is that you always have to remember to update your prior view of things, because otherwise you are making false assumptions based on outdated information.

As marketers we often fall into the trap of neglecting to “update our prior.” We pick a demographic and a target profile, and we stick with it. This is natural byproduct of having studied and chased after a singular customer segment for many years. Over time, however, customer needs may have changed, and new prospects may have emerged unnoticed. Examples of this tendency include industries like automotive and electronics.  In these markets brands have been targeting men forever, not realizing that the wife in the family may be the primary decision-makers for household purchase decisions. Unfortunately, a narrow focus on demographics can cause marketers to miss critical shifts in their audience profiles.

A recent study by Microsoft confirms this theory.  The study shows that premium brands have been missing up to 50% of their best audience by relying too heavily on targeting only to the affluent. Purchase behavior turned out to be a more important indicator than affluence.  In fact, 43% of online customers in Europe are premium buyers, yet this group is not affluent by any traditional measure.

So what are some of the other reasons marketers may be missing their targets?

1. Customers Are a Moving Target

Changing habits and overlapping interests and hobbies can sometimes be hard to correlate with buying behavior. While there is a preponderance of information available on the Web, many data providers offer a limited view of the user.  With the right audience measurement tools, however, marketers can put the pieces together to create a coherent picture.  A story in Ad Exchanger describes a marketer targeting home-based business users with children.  In order to reach this demographic, he had to combine data for micro-business users, home-based users, and households with children from three separate data providers. Scaling audiences can be particularly difficult without the ability to normalize and aggregate audience profiles in one place. Using web-based tools to measure who is engaging with your messaging and who is responding to your offers will give you a better view of a larger potential customer pool.

2. Aiming at the Wrong Target

Products are often delivered to market with preconceived expectations about who the audience will be.  When David Roberts, the CEO of PopCap launched a game called Bejeweled on Facebook, he fully expected the game to appeal to a young male audience.  Instead, he was astounded to learn that 70% of the game players were women.  The social aspect of the game was an attraction for young mothers who were stuck at home, and wanted to play and interact with friends and family.  I’m not sure why anyone thought a game called Bejeweled would be a magnet for young males, but never mind. The company had to integrate this new view of its customers into its marketing strategy.

3. The Unintended Target

Toyota Scion was a car designed specifically to appeal to a youth segment with a focus on customizable features and a low price.  The original target was young people, 20-25 years old, and Scion avoided the Toyota brand name because they felt it was too ‘old’.  Toyota soon discovered that the Scion appealed simultaneously to both millennial upstarts and empty-nest boomers.  Auto makers now are looking to replicate this model and design more Twin Peaks Cars. That is, cars that have two peaks in a line graph of the age distribution of the buyers.

So how can brands best identify and consistently maintain the right targeting?

The key to developing good market targets is to be clear on your segmentation strategy, and then market specifically to those targets. But don’t fall in love with a target profile, be flexible and ready to make changes based on updated data.  Ideally, marketers should measure customers based on three yardsticks, behavioral, transactional, and demographic. Behavioral marketing allows brands to identify their highest value segments.  Transactional data allows marketers to revisit their current customer profile to see if anything has changed.  Demographic data makes it easy for brands to understand their audience and identify customers.

Marketers need to learn how to optimize marketing based on business intelligence gathered during the campaign.  The real-time technology platforms that enable audience measurement and campaign management provide an advantage to the marketer.   Those platforms, coupled with smart targeting techniques, create a new opportunity for greater scale and efficiency in online marketing.  Marketers can discover new customers by using audience measurement that provides more insight into those responding to your message. In other words, sometimes you just need to update your prior.

As marketers rev up their new acquisition programs, it’s important to think about the customer as more than just a number in a database.  Customers are savvy and are clearly in control more than ever before.  So to truly be able to penetrate a new audience, you must treat them like you would a close friend.

Every great relationship, be it with a friend, co-working or customer, is dependent on good communications and a continuous fair value exchange.   Without that, someone always feels left out, abused and taken advantage of.  If you don’t understand how to listen and value your friends and relationships you’ll have limited success in your personal and business endeavors.   How often do you hear of people or groups of people being referred to as Readers, Customers or Consumers?   Those names are a bit impersonal, but not as bad as Aggregators, Data, Leads or Screamers.   How a company refers to its prospects and customers tells you lot about how those people are treated and valued.   How do you like it when “that friend” (and you all have one) call you or stops by only when they want something but are never interested in returning the favor or bringing some sort of value to the table…beyond what you’d expect from an acquaintance.

We’re all somewhat dependent on each other and while developing a competitive advantage is important in business, it’s much more important to building trusting, efficient, scalable and sustainable relationships.    If we pick a few important common goals, we’ll be much more aligned with our partners and that’s one of the most important competitive advantages you can have.

Remember, if you put the customer’s needs and wants first, you will generate not just a lead, but a loyal customer.

The Shift to Digital according to Datran Media's 4th Annual Marketing Survey. In 2010, what percentage of your company's overall multi-channel advertising campaign will be allocated to digital marketing channels?*

12.4% in 2010 to $61.0 billion. Plus, it will grow 64% from there to over $100 billion in five years.  That’s certainly good news for the industry as a whole, especially considering the gloomy forecasts that were being predicted just over a year ago.  So what does this mean for you?  It means the online marketplace is going to get increasingly crowded with your competitors; and unless you have smart plan to reach your ideal audience, you’re going to get lost in the crowd.

As more and more advertisers move their media budgets online, consumers are going to be inundated with more choices from more brands.  That means you’re going to need to tailor your messages to be relevant to your perfect audience.  The problem most marketers are unsure who their ideal customer really is.  Do you know the composition of your audience?  DO you know who is really engaging with your campaigns?  What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) matter most to you when measuring campaigns?

More than ever, measurement is going to be crucial part of your success in the digital space. Audience measurement may be a nebulous term, especially in digital media where there is both linear and non-linear communication with your audience, and the ability for that audience to receive and reciprocate communication through multiple channel lines at once. As a result, there are a variety of dimensions that can be measured as it pertains to the audience; composition, awareness, engagement, social influence, and path preference to name a few. But regardless of the definition, what you measure needs to provide the opportunity for insight while furthering the quest to understand the value that is delivered for both you and your audience.

Measurement is ineffective unless it provides insight into delivered value. Therefore, advertisers have to define the value they seek to create before determining effectiveness.  Those that do it correctly will prosper; those that do not will have little to show other than wasted media budgets.

We only just met. Now we’re talking engagement? I know the mere thought of commitment makes some of you break out in a rash. Understandably, engagement can be a pretty scary prospect. But take it from me, there’s nothing to fear. Now is the time to embrace engagement in a big way because engagement is the new black, the way of the jungle, the bee’s knees, and the cat’s meow all rolled into one. Engagement will be the single most important buzzword you hear in email marketing this year.

Here’s the skinny on engagement. Every day, the path to your customer’s inbox gets more and more narrow. ISPs are now not only looking at your reputation, mailing history and content before deciding to deliver to the inbox or the bulk folder, they now want your recipients to actually engage with your messages. Engagement in its simplest form means that when an email arrives in an inbox, it is actually opened and clicked. If messages aren’t engaging to their recipients, ISPs have started to help recipients out with inbox maintenance. You read that right. Messages that don’t generate clicks and opens will be filtered to the bulk or spam folders.

So what does this mean for senders? It means we’ve got to make ourselves presentable very quickly. Our reputation still matters. Our identity and infrastructure still matter. But, now we also have to be charming. You can put your best foot forward in email by following some of these best practices:

• Only send messages with a clear purpose and message — all email should have a clear and identifiable call to action
• Email templates should resemble your Web site to help with visual identification
• “From” names should clearly identify your company and not change
• Subject lines should clearly explain what your message is about

Commitment is good once you take the first step to building a long lasting relationship with your customers. Go out and get engaged!

This survey is intended to provide the marketing community with a better understanding of how online marketing plans will impact what we all do in 2010 and beyond. We appreciate your time and feedback. The survey was designed to take you less than five minutes to complete!

In exchange for your time, Datran Media will select 20 lucky winners at random to send a $10 iTunes gift card. They survey will be open until Jan. 22. Thank you in advance for your time!

Click here to launch the survey.

Last night in New York City, both PGATOUR.com and Datran Media were honored by DPAC as one of the innovators in the rapidly morphing media and marketing industry. Congratulations!

Using state-of-the-art technology with its email platform, StormPost, Datran Media helped PGATOUR.COM deliver groundbreaking email messages with live streaming video embedded within the body of the email. PGATOUR.COM discovered its fans favored video emails over the static email message. Initial campaign results revealed that emails with video received a 34 percent click-through rate versus a 14 percent click-through rate for the emails without embedded streaming video. PGATOUR.COM now plans to integrate additional KPI metrics into the measurement plan it employs as it embeds video into more of its fan-focused campaigns.

Click here to see a summary of this campaign:

http://www.datranmedia.com/pgatour/

So how are retailers reaching out to customers this holiday? They are sticking to the basics; using tried-and-true marketing channels like email and search. According to BDO Seidman, in its Retail Compass Survey, email promotions were at the top of retailers online marketing strategies. A focus on free shipping offers just edged out search marketing for second place. Not surprisingly Shop.org found that 100% of online retailers surveyed planned email marketing efforts to house lists this holiday season.

Despite the fantastic numbers being reported for Cyber Monday, the busiest online shopping day tends to be later in December, usually the Saturday before Christmas, and is the last day that gifts can be shipped to guarantee delivery by Christmas Day. So retailers can expect another boost to what was a challenging year revenue wise.

The beautiful thing about email is that campaigns can be produced in a relatively short amount of time, which means you can still take advantage of the upcoming holiday shopping surge. Just be sure to employ these crucial email strategies with this email marketing holiday checklist.

Everything, from the rise of data-driven ad targeting and social media, to episodic online video, mobile, and apps, were discussed in the context of significantly changing media consumption habits. With many companies still scrambling to embrace these new tools as a way to deliver their marketing messages to customers, the panel reviewed some important strategies marketers must employ to keep from falling behind in the ever-changing digital landscape. Audience discovery was a crucial part of this discussion.

One of the most innovative digital trends seen in 2009, according to Datran Media’s Chief Revenue Officer Sean O’Neal, are the new methods marketers have to leverage data for better audience targeting and measurement. Advancements in behavioral technology have given marketers the tools they need to truly understand their audience beyond simple Web browsing statistics, like site visits and time spent on a site. Transactional, behavioral and search data can be blended to better define and discover your customer. What’s more, the opportunity to leverage offline data like retail transaction history and household-level demographics has created the most effective form of addressable media. Being able to reach a targeted audience rather than investing in the mass distribution of your message will drive better results by precision and cost-savings.

So what’s on the horizon for digital marketers? Sean O’Neal believes there will be a major convergence of devices leading to new media channels. New technology will essentially combine the PC and the television, creating a whole new channel opportunity for marketers. Consumers will use a single device to access media, read email and chat with friends and family. Devices like AppleTV are already making this a reality. With the level of data available to marekters, they will be able to hone their messages to their customers at the height of the consumer’s media engagement.

The next 12-24 months are very exciting for anyone in the digital space. But not just for us marketers, consumers will truly benefit by the way we will be able to deliver messages to them.

Selling ad space in email newsletters is proving to be the bright spot of the acquisition market — especially in the media/news industry. The Magazine Publishers of America stated that in the first quarter of 2008, email was a central driver behind 70 million unique consumer visits to online magazine sites.

To provide a comprehensive resource for publishers and marketers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the release of Email Monetization Strategies, the next step in the IAB’s ongoing efforts to establish a solid foundation of guidance and tools for the email marketplace. It provides publishers, agencies and marketers with recommendations and best practices for the successful execution of email marketing campaigns.

The recommendations outlined in this document offer best practices and advice for:
Advertisers
o Leveraging email newsletters to reach a valuable audience
o Using the email channel to test offers and promotions
o Driving sales and site registration through stand alone email advertising
o Criteria for choosing a email publisher
o Emerging trend of video in email campaigns

Publishers
o Revenue opportunities through sponsorship and ad units in email newsletters
o Pricing models for email monetization
o Inventory management
o Data collection
o Developing a video email campaign

“The email channel offers a unique opportunity to reach consumers with relevant, differentiated and personalized content and messaging,” said Sherrill Mane, SVP, Industry Services, IAB. “Email Monetization Strategies provides an in-depth assessment and guide to maximizing the success of email marketing.”

“Email is one of the most effective direct and brand marketing mediums,” said Sean O’Neal, Chief Revenue Officer, Datran Media, and co-chair of the IAB’s Email Committee. “These best practices provide the latest information and strategies to marketers and publishers so that they can maximize their email communications with their customers.”

1.Know Your Audience:
Leverage behavioral, demographic & transactional data to define your audience & create new monetization opportunities.

2.Invest in Advanced Advertising Technologies:
Enabling targeted buys featuring rich media is key.

3.Email is Targeted & Effective:
Mobile growth & new technologies (i.e. email video delivery) will enable email marketers to become even more effective.

4.Email is Targeted & Effective:
Mobile growth & new technologies (i.e. email video delivery) will enable email marketers to become even more effective.

5.Use the Power of Video:
Video’s engagement metrics can help maximize your impact with your audience and your advertisers.

If you would like to learn more about any of these topics, contact us and check out some interesting articles on the topic in our thought leadership library.