Commerce brands often focus their audience targeting strategies on consumers who are already in the market and actively shopping for a particular product.
A fashion brand, for example, might spend a large portion of its advertising budget on retargeting customers who’ve visited its online store in search of a particular item of clothing. Or it might pay to get in front of shoppers who are actively searching for that garment on other retail platforms.
While inherently logical, using these end-of-funnel tactics alone means commerce brands may miss out on reaching audiences that would love their products, and have genuine need for them despite not actively shopping for them – yet.
Instead, brands should turn their attention to the far greater pool of high-value customers that are hiding in their blind spot. These are the customers who aren’t far enough along in their purchase journey to be actively shopping, but do have a particular need state that makes them more likely than the average consumer to be interested in the brand’s products. We explain more about these need states in our whitepaper, Overcoming Audience Blind Spots.
For the fashion brand mentioned earlier, one example of a need state might be consumers who are starting a new job and require a wardrobe upgrade. Another might be those attending a wedding or other major event that justifies a special outfit. People that have a vacation booked, or even those living in an area experiencing unseasonable weather, all have a need state that could necessitate clothing purchases.
Identifying these audiences and their need states allows brands to reach shoppers before they’re actively in the market for a product. But tapping into these high-value growth audiences requires a deep understanding of how they shop, what motivates them, what life stage they’re at, what media they consume, and their spending patterns.
And here’s the thing. It’s likely that many of the granular insights your brand can use to research and identify need states already exist within your organization. They’re just fragmented in departmental data silos. The trick is facilitating the flow of that knowledge to the parts of the business that need it.
Every part of your organization is sitting on information that could be useful to help understand shoppers and identify high-value audiences (HVAs) that have specific need states. But because those individual parts of the organization operate in silos, a unified strategic view of how to use the information may be missing.
Here are just a few examples of where valuable insights might be found within your organization:
Breaking down organizational silos and encouraging the free flow of information between teams may well deliver all the insights commerce brands need to identify and reach high-value audiences before they become active shoppers.
These three steps will help to facilitate knowledge transfer across your organization:
Step one: Focus on a unified view of customer information
It’s not necessarily the case that individual teams don’t want to work together and service their joint customers well using a unified view of CRM data. It’s more likely that they simply don’t realize the information they have could be useful to other parts of the organization, and to consumers. Teams can be so focused on their own tasks and KPIs – with the media team aiming for return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for example, and the finance team concerned with the cost of goods sold (COGS) – that they don’t think to share insights.
Commerce brands need to instill a culture of data-driven collaboration that comes from the top. Leaders need to be clear about their expectations around data sharing, and build trust through transparency and open communication that encourages feedback. They should celebrate the results that are achieved when teams collaborate effectively with data.
It’s important to note that insight should flow in all directions. While media teams can benefit from product development data to identify high-value audiences with certain need states, the product team can also benefit from media performance data when developing new products.
Step two: Provide the tools for data sharing
Instilling a culture of data collaboration will only work if teams have the tools they need to share data. This doesn’t necessarily mean ripping out existing department-specific systems and replacing them.
Dashboard-style solutions can be used to draw information from siloed systems and establish a single source of truth. With different levels of access and team-specific views, these dashboards become a destination where knowledge is openly shared, KPIs are unified and tracked, and media is powered to reach those high-value customers.
Step three: Review data resources regularly
The data and insights available to your brand are constantly changing. As new product lines are launched, new marketing channels emerge, and new systems are introduced either to replace or complement existing technologies, the range of data and insights within your organization continually evolves.
Despite the best of intentions, it’s easy for teams to slip back into old, siloed ways of working, and not realize the value of the data they hold. So, it’s important to:
If you’d like to find out more about how to tap into growth audiences outside of the traditional funnel model of shopper behavior, download our whitepaper – Overcoming Audience Blind Spots – which includes a five-step approach to driving revenue growth.
