As marketing professionals improve at optimizing their advertising campaigns around personalized messaging and graphics for target audiences, a “Time Machine” strategy of targeting prospects will become more prominent in 2019.
What’s a Time Machine for marketing? It’s a new approach to targeting the best prospects based on what they might have done – or attended – in the past.
Tracking behavior via AI and advanced analytics of individuals who have attended an event in the past and targeting them for digital outreach offers a new avenue of personalized digital marketing. In one recent example, Bluetext identified everyone who has gone to see a sports team over the past year, with the intent of serving up ads for with offers to buy season tickets or branded merchandise. Only recently have the data analytics and AI been available that could identify who attended a game over the past year. That’s why we call it “Time Machine” technology.
Yet, Time Machine strategies don’t stop at just attendance. Personalization also means setting up a whole system of user personas, messages for each persona, and specific creative that will appeal to them. Then, if prospect (A) performs action (B), they receive item (C); while prospect (X) performing acting (B) will result in them receiving item (Z). So while two individual prospects may have both gone to the same game, getting them to buy the tickets for next season may require different messages to push them over the finish line. Tracking behavior via artificial intelligence and targeting audiences for digital outreach is just one of the ways that a “Time Machine” strategy leverages deep data as a new avenue of personalized digital marketing.
Personalization is powerful because it solves the problem of relevance. Traditionally, ads were targeted at mass audiences, meaning that the vast majority of impressions were useless because they were not relevant to the viewer. A Time Machine strategy, paired with a robust personalization system, means that you can deliver more relevant ads and, in turn, have a better chance of converting more prospects.
At the end of the day, a Time Machine strategy is all about increasing relevance by matching an individual’s past behavior with a message and/or creative that compels them to repeat that behavior. Your brand’s value proposition, communicated in the prospect’s language, matching their expectations, and addressing their unique needs and desires, will be more meaningful with a Time Machine strategy.