The crux of good advertising, when you boil it right down, is about reaching customers with the right message at the right moment in time.
Of course, actually doing this is a lot easier said than done. However, in our ever-more-online world, we have more insight into where our customers are in their journey, how they are engaging with our brand, and when they might be in the market for a particular product or service. The challenge for marketers, therefore, lies in better understanding customers and using this information to reach them with the most relevant messaging.
Two brands that have been doing this with great success are Farfetch, the ecommerce platform for luxury goods, and comparison brand Uswitch. In the second season of ‘Marketing that Matters’, a podcast from Econsultancy and Marketing Week sponsored by Google, both brands spoke about how they have used customer data and automation to reach audiences at the right moment and engage them with the brand.
Adapting to evolving customer trends
Many sectors saw drastic shifts in customer Philippines Photo Editor behaviour brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated trends, such as home working and the digitalisation of many aspects of day-to-day life.
Sometimes, it has been relatively straightforward to determine how these will affect purchasing habits, but more often than not, marketers have needed reliable real-time sources of customer data to understand what these trends mean for their brand and how they can position themselves to take advantage.
Adam Cartlidge, Senior Director of Customer Acquisition at Farfetch, explained in the third episode of Marketing That Matters how his team used search data to determine how pandemic trends were affecting how customers interacted with luxury goods. Luxury retail was drastically impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and the closure of bricks and mortar stores and boutiques; however, the demand for luxury goods was very much still present, just manifesting itself in different ways. As Cartlidge told Russell Parsons, Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Week and the host of Marketing That Matters:
“If we focus a little bit more on the search data side, it’s not just about the obvious trends. … Consumers were still interested in purchasing luxury items for themselves and others. From a business sense, we’ve all been living on video calls for the last 13 months, potentially more. And there’s a great focus people have on homeware – making renovations and improvements to our video call backdrops.
“You’ve then got a demand in shirts, blouses, caps, eyewear – essentially, anything above the waist that’s in view. We could see how people were reacting there.”