Feature Focus: Cross-Channel Audiences for Search and Social

Cross-Channel Audiences are a new Skai feature that can automatically connect the dots for advertisers to target the same consumers across Search and Social advertising. 

In just about every survey on cross-channel advertising for the last twenty years, digital marketers feel that it is more powerful and effective than non-integrated advertising. After all, consumers require an average of almost six touch-points—with nearly 50% regularly using more than four—on their path to purchase. Reaching the same person with messages across channels and using what you know about their interests and preferences to put the most relevant ads in front of them makes perfect sense. 

It can’t be understated that true, coordinated cross-channel marketing seems to be regarded as the “holy grail” for advertisers. The problem is that getting to cross-channel nirvana can be difficult.

Marketers tend to cite cross-channel challenges as both technical (no integrated tools, issues around tracking, measurement limitations) as well as organizational (siloed teams, misaligned goals, lack of expertise) for reasons why their organizations are not yet aligned to working in a cross-channel way even while overwhelming agreeing that it’s the right approach to marketing.

Cross-Channel Audiences: Where to Start?

Because going cross-channel has proven to be extremely difficult for marketers, it makes sense to start with just a few, priority publishers and go from there.

Where best to start connecting channels than Google and Facebook?

Dubbed “the Duopoly” due to their sustained dominance in garnering marketing budgets, Google’s and Facebook’s continuing growth is a major factor in leading us to forecast that digital channels will account for more than 50% of total ad spending next year in the U.S. this year. Just about every consumer touches Facebook and Google on a fairly regular basis, so the reach and scale that these two online publishers offer advertisers is unparalleled.

Skai Cross-Channel Audiences

Cross-Channel Audiences is the evolution of Skai’s award-winning Intent-Driven Audiences (IDA), which, among its accolades, won the highly competitive Facebook PMD Innovation Award a few years ago. IDA solved the first big challenge in this area by allowing marketers to automatically add Google paid search visitors to targeting audiences on Facebook.

Skai’s Cross-Channel Audiences enables advertisers to implement a full-funnel targeting strategy by reaching people on one marketing channel who engaged with their ads on another. Specifically, with Cross-Channel Audiences, a website visitor that arrives via a click on a Google or Facebook can then be automatically added either as a website audience for the other channel.

This audience feature takes advantage of Skai’s cross-channel marketing capabilities, making it possible to drive an audience from awareness to purchase, no matter what channel they’re on.

“Marketers really want to do more cross-channel, but it’s been hard for them to create and manage these kinds of audiences on their own,” says Crissi Cupak, Skai’s Sr. Director of Product. “We’ve heard from our clients and the industry at large that they hope and expect their marketing technology partners to find a solution. We started with Intent-Driven Audiences and now Cross-Channel Audiences are the evolution that can connect marketers’ two biggest digital channels: Search and Social”

Cross-Channel Audiences Example Use Cases

Cross-Channel Audiences Example: Use What You Know About People from One Channel to Target Them on Another

A retail brand can set up a campaign on Search that targets people who clicked on their ad on Social. Their Search team can bid higher on middle or lower funnel keywords as the advertiser knows this person is already interested in their product based on their recent engagement on social. We make it possible for clients to run full-funnel, cross-channel marketing campaigns using signals from one channel to impact performance on another.

Cross-Channel Audiences Example: Leverage Facebook’s Deep Consumer Data on Google

Another way clients leverage Cross-Channel Audiences is to help qualify their audience because there are more robust targeting parameters on Facebook than there are on Google.

For example, a military brand targeting people on Facebook who have served or are currently in the military can create an audience targeting pool of people who clicked on the ad and then retarget them when they search on Google. So, in essence, brands can find ways to use Facebook’s deep data pool to segment audiences for Search when those audiences aren’t identifiable natively in Google. 

Cross-Channel Audiences: Why This is So Important

• 55% of companies have no cross-channel strategy in place. Source: The CMO Club
• 62% of consumers who engage their favorite brands on 10+ channels make weekly purchases. Source: Marketing Land
• Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses that don’t. Source: Aspect Software (update 5/2022, Aspect is now Alvaria)
• Campaigns integrating 4 or more digital channels will outperform single or dual-channel campaigns by 300%. Source: Gartner Research
• Omni-channel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel. Source: Google
• By 2020, the demand for an omnichannel customer experience will be amplified by the need for nearly perfect execution. Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers

Want to learn more about Skai Cross-Channel Audiences?

If you are a Skai client and would like more info, please reach out to your Skai rep.

For non-Skai clients, please contact us or even schedule a quick, no pressure demo to see this feature in action.

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