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How Consumer Packaged Goods Companies Can Leverage Third-Party Data to Improve Marketing Effectiveness

Published: August 17, 2021 by Steve Zimmerman, Director of Custom Analytics, Experian Marketing Services

Third-party data has become the cornerstone to improve marketing effectiveness across all types of online and offline media. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing faces a challenge when utilizing this data, as sales are often made through distributors such as grocery stores or mass merchandisers rather than directly to consumers. 

Without customer data files that can be enriched for insight, CPG companies often base marketing decisions on custom market positioning studies, surveys and generic consumer personas. These solutions can be quite expensive and prove difficult to develop a targeted marketing program. 

Optimize your CPG marketing strategy

We have a team of experts that leverage the wealth of our database of thousands of attributes covering more than 300 million U.S. consumers and 130 million U.S. households—to identify the demographics and attitudes of a CPG target consumer using syndicated, mobile location, social media, and online behavioral data. 

We help connect various data points to provide CPG marketers with the ability to identify likely consumers, generate actionable marketing insight, and enable targeted advertising to these consumers that increases brand awareness and drives purchase behavior. 

graph showing percentage of different consumer groups who search for frozen meals in storesIdentifying likely consumers for consumer packaged goods 

To gain marketing insight about your customers, you need to identify consumers who are actively engaged with your brand, and compare them against non-engaged consumers, or consumers engaged with rival brands. 

Experian uses syndicated and digital actions data to identify these consumers and understand their characteristics. With digital actions data, we leverage search terms and landing pages relevant to your brand. We use our linking capabilities to identify the perfect target audience for your marketing initiatives.  


For example, we leveraged syndicated data that showed consumer preference for frozen meals based on household characteristics. This enabled our client to better understand the market size and attributes of its active consumers.
 

Actionable CPG marketing insight 

Once marketers identify who their optimal target consumer is, they can begin to understand their ideal audience and compare it to consumers of competitive brands. This helps identify key demographics and psychographics that over-index to users of the brands compared to the population. 

As a result, you can gain a much better understanding of the demographics, life stage and lifestyle of your target consumer. We also help you to better inform your marketing communication and media and distribution strategies by identifying the channels your ideal audience is most likely to be found.  

Getting back to our example, consumers of frozen foods were found more likely to be females between the ages of 35-54 with busy families. They had multiple children in the home and participated in family activities, like zoos and fast-food dining. 

We were then able to identify the digital channels they were more actively engaged with and determine factors that influence their decision-making, such as product quality or consumer testimonials.  

By gaining insight into your target audience, you can create digital communication focused on specifics, like an active family looking for a quality meal. 

 percentage of population by age who buys frozen meals

Turning insights into action by enabling targeted advertising 

With a better understanding of your target consumer, and the insight needed to catch their attention, you can unify your ideal target audience and serve advertising that builds brand awareness and increases conversion. 

Our Custom Analytics team uses advanced analytical techniques to create custom consumer personas. Our database of 130 million U.S. households is scored with a proprietary algorithm created specifically for your organization and creates audiences that are pushed to the preferred marketing channel of your target consumers. 

Leveraging our ConsumerView database, we can easily enable direct communication to your targeted consumers (such as our example that identified consumers of frozen food and their preferred channels) through direct mail, email, digital display, social media and mobile channels. 

We work directly with agencies to deploy an audience to a destination and can manage a campaign for our CPG clients. 

We can even help you determine campaign success by measuring campaign performance versus a relevant control, and profiles converters to help you see gains made in brand awareness to target consumers. 

These services give you the ability to test an advertisement directly to targeted consumers, measure the effectiveness of the advertisement, then plow back the learnings into future campaigns, enabling greater consumer brand awareness and conversion while managing marketing effectiveness. 

Experian is here to help 

We have worked extensively with a variety of CPG companies to improve marketing effectiveness and drive brand awareness. We can help your organization take your marketing campaigns to the next level. Our data assets and advanced analytics generate actionable insights that enable you to identify and communicate with consumers more effectively. 

For more information about how we can help your organization gain valuable insights to identify your ideal customers and the best channels to reach them, contact us. 

 

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About Experian Marketing Services

At Experian Marketing Services, we use data and insights to help brands have more meaningful interactions with people. As leaders in the evolution of the advertising landscape, Experian Marketing Services can help you identify your customers and the right potential customers, uncover the most appropriate communication channels, develop messages that resonate, and measure the effectiveness of marketing activities and campaigns.

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