Skai Audience Manager. In today’s Friday Feature Focus, we examine this tool which enables marketers to manage their audiences holistically across channels.
Regardless of the tools, technology, ad formats, and the millions of variables to consider, at its core, marketing is really all about audiences. In fact, a shared quality amongst successful marketers is their obsession with understanding their target audience so they can best reach, influence, and convert them into customers.
In a January survey of 450 advertisers, publishers, and tech developers in North America by Winterberry Group and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), 62.0% of respondents said that improving audience segmentation to support better ad targeting was one of their top campaign management priorities.
Skai Audience Manager is needed with the increased focus on first-party data
Various market trends such as recent, highly-publicized data breaches and increased global data restrictions (such as GDPR) are driving marketers to really think through how they can better leverage the data they collect from their customers — better known as first-party data.
Skai Audience Manager enables marketers to manage first-party audiences holistically across the leading native media platforms for more relevant consumer engagements throughout their purchasing journey. “We know audiences are front and center for both social and search,” says Sam Ho, Skai’s Director of Product. “We want to make it super scalable and efficient so that our clients can target the right people at the right time in a seamless way.”
“And while we know that many marketers are still stuck in a siloed approach, this means the social marketer is spending time manually uploading one audience and then the search marketer ends up uploading that same audience independently. We solve for both of that by taking that same audience and automatically uploading and refreshing it across multiple publishers and accounts.
“Furthermore, we know that audience targeting is only becoming more complex,” says Ho. “Google keeps releasing new audience features (like in market segments, demographics, similar audiences), Bing is incorporating LinkedIn targeting, etc. If you don’t do something now to help scale the management of these audiences you’re going to be way behind the curve when it comes to the most efficient way to target your audience and acquire customers.”
The first step in Skai Audience Manager is to define the goal of the audience to be created.
Skai Audience Manager: Activate your CRM
Most companies keep customer information in a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) platform. In a CRM record, companies can store information such as addresses & phone numbers, past purchase history, what emails or ads were clicked, what parts of the website that the customer visited, etc. All of this information can be used to segment customers into relevant groups based on whatever behaviors or attributes they desire.
Large publishers such as Facebook and Google are able to match customer lists against their user base at a high rate, and because all of the processing is done behind-the-scenes, no personally identifiable information (PII) is passed to the advertiser.
“Most brands are sitting on a virtual gold-mine of first-party data,” says Crissi Cupak, Skai’s Product Growth Manager. “Skai Audience Manager helps marketers get their data onboarded to search and social publisher platforms quickly and easily so they can get out of the weeds and spend more time on high-value strategic tasks.”
For both Search and Social marketers, segmenting their campaign activity by audience segment makes a lot of sense. Enabling first-party audience segments means that marketers can use different bids and ad copy for different segments — even if they search on the same keywords or visit the same social profiles.
“Marketers understand the value of audience segmentation,” says Cupak. “It’s been part of the marketing DNA for decades. The way you value and message to a loyal, repeat customer who spends a lot with you should be different than how you speak to a customer who hasn’t purchased from you in a few years or to a consumer who’s never shopped with you before. Marketing is most effective when it’s most relevant to the audience.”
Once loaded into Skai Audience Manager, audiences can be managed easily across channels.
Skai Audience Manager: Automatically Stay In-Sync
One of the key benefits of Skai Audience Manager is that once the connection is made to the client’s CRM system, it will stay in sync without needing manual refreshes. What this means to the marketer is that they don’t have to continuously upload new lists to the publisher platforms, but rather as new or existing customers enter the defined segments, they are added to the marketing audience.
For example, let’s say that a company defines any customer who spends $1000 or more to be a high-value customer segment. If a new customer spends $1200, they will be automatically added to the targeting pool.
Another common tactic is to use audience suppression to make sure you are not targeting people who recently purchased. But talking to many marketers, they tell us they only update these lists once per month or even once per quarter because it’s just a pain to keep up to date. Which means they continue to retarget users who purchased for up to 3 months after they already purchased!!
This sync feature can save many, many repetitive hours for marketers who need to constantly refresh their targeting segments.
Skai Audience Manager Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Do I have to load the same audiences for different publishers one at a time?
Nope. Once you upload an audience, Skai Audience Manager can distribute it to all of our integrated partners that support first-party audience lists.
Q.What does Skai do with the data I’m passing to create my Customer Lists audiences?
No customer information is stored on Skai’s servers. Skai is only the pipe here. We upload this data to the publishers in a secure way.
Q. My client doesn’t want to share his data with me. How can I still create the audiences for them?
The end client can use Dropbox or SFTP connection. You will see the name of the file, without accessing it, in the flow.
For more information on Skai Audience Manager, Skai clients can reach out to their Skai rep. For non-clients, please contact us or schedule a demo to see how Skai can help supercharge your marketing.
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