Being relevant is no longer good enough.
As marketers, we need to be useful. That means being honest and open with our audience, and always adding value.
That’s where interest-based marketing comes in. It’s all about targeting passive customers with highly personalised messages and experiences based on extensive audience research.
At its best, it sits at the intersection of marketing and customer service, because it feels more like advising and helping an individual than targeting thousands of people through a single, generic campaign.
You can probably imagine how powerful this approach can be when executed effectively. Here’s how to do it:
The first piece of the interest-based marketing puzzle is identifying who you’re targeting and what appeals to them. We can break it down into two separate steps:
Segmentation is crucial, because you can’t personalise your marketing if you’re speaking to everyone — that’s the opposite of personalisation. In fact, marketers have found that segmented email campaigns deliver up to a 760% increase in revenue vs. non-segmented campaigns.
Even if you only sell a single product, you almost certainly have multiple audiences.
For instance, let’s say you offer cold email software. Your overall audience is effectively ‘anyone who sends a lot of emails’, but that’s far too broad for personalisation. With a bit of thought you can segment it into categories like:
Brainstorm all the possible audiences that exist for the product or service you’re marketing, then move on to step two…
You know who your audiences are. Now it’s time to figure out what they like. What resonates with them? What would persuade them to click your ads?
Don’t rely on guesswork; dive into all the data you can get your hands on. Different data categories will provide you with different insights and understandings:
Examples include:
Typically used for:
First-party data is unique to your brand. It accurately demonstrates the paths your customers take to convert, and the points where non-converters drop off, which makes it highly valuable.
However, by its very nature, it only demonstrates the results of your previous actions. If you’ve mostly been targeting a single type of customer through previous marketing activity, they’re the people who’ll show up in your first-party data. So it might not provide the insights you need to reach new audiences.
Examples include:
Typically used for:
This is effectively another company’s first-party data. Brands in similar spaces, with similar audiences, often team up to share data with one another.
For instance, let’s return to the example of our cold email software provider. To acquire more data on salespeople, you could strike an agreement with another software company that offers productivity and time-tracking solutions for sales teams.
It’s valuable because it furthers your understanding of your existing audience, and potentially enables you to tap into entirely new audiences and behaviours.
Examples include:
Typically used for:
This data is purchased from an aggregator, which in turn accumulated it from numerous original sources.
Because it comes from so many different sources, third-party data can give you a much broader understanding of consumer behaviour than you’d ever get from first and second-party data.
However, it has its downsides, particularly where quality is concerned. Indeed, two-thirds of people say the third-party data about them is only 0-50% accurate.
Examples include:
Typically used for:
A relatively new piece of terminology, zero-party data (ZPD) is the information that consumers willingly and proactively provide because they trust your brand.
Often, there’ll be an incentive for a customer to hand over data in this way. You might offer them a discount or free sample in exchange for completing a questionnaire.
While less well-known than the other three types of data, ZPD is becoming increasingly important in a world where consumers demand greater transparency and control over how their data is used.
Analysing data from some — or ideally all — of those sources should help you build a clear picture of exactly who your audiences are and what influences them to buy. Now, it’s time to put that into practice:
All that data will be useless if you’re not advertising in the right places.
With interest-based marketing, you’re not just looking for the platforms your audience have signed up to; you need to find the places where they actually enjoy hanging out.
For instance, it’s easy to assume your audience lives on Facebook — after all, it has 2.7 billion monthly active users.
But those figures are highly skewed toward users in certain demographics. Whereas 96% of Baby Boomers log into Facebook at least once a week, only 36% of Gen Z-ers do the same. So if your audience skews younger, YouTube is probably a smarter bet.
Finally, it’s time to create bespoke campaigns that tap into the interests of your audiences, and are relevant to the channel(s) you’re targeting.
Clearly, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving this. An auto brand might leverage ideas like design, driving, and racing to engage their audience, whereas a design brand would align to things like concepts and innovations.
Importantly, whatever messaging you arrive at, you must present it in an authentic manner. Nine in ten consumers say authenticity plays a key part in deciding which brands they like and support.
In other words, don’t start touting your environmental credentials or shouting about your charity work unless it’s a core part of your brand. Customers are savvy enough to detect when brands aren’t speaking authentically.
What tactics do you use to tap into the interests of your audience(s)? Let me know in the comments below:
