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The 5 keys to connecting with real people - Part II: recognition and reach

In our first post in this series [read here] we noted that to be able to speak to consumers with accurate and compelling messages, marketers need one view of the individual across all the channels and devices they own and engage with.

Recognition

This may seem obvious but recognising who you are talking to is an essential first step to successful digital marketing. Messaging the wrong person sends a poor message to the consumer and is a complete waste of ad spend. But with the explosion of devices attached to each consumer in recent years, recognition has become harder than ever.

For example, consumers own an average of 3.4 devices each and to have real conversations you need to know who you’re talking to and on what. Each person is linked to multiple cookies every month so if you don’t recognise that they’re the same person across devices and browsers, you’ll end up repeating your message and wasting money.

Mobile ad spending is growing — and is set to surpass desktop by 2018 – but the majority of conversions still happen on a desktop. If you start your conversation on mobile, you’ll want to be able to close the deal on a desktop, which works only if you’re speaking to the same person.

The ideal approach should be able to respond to the biggest recognition challenges:

Multiple devices: if a consumer’s devices are not connected to each other, they will see the same ads repeated, or see ads after they have made a purchase. All devices should be connected to a known person (anonymously), who is also connected to a rich data profile.

Getting the right message to the right device: some people with multiple devices make purchases only on one of them. Marketers need to understand which device is the most important for each person.

Getting a consistent message across devices: pushing different products across devices dilutes impact so it’s important to keep the message consistent by matching at person level, not just device level.

Reach

Your marketing solution should have enough scale to reach a significant portion of your audience. For maximum impact, marketers need access to the right data sources that give them that scale.

Partnering with Conversant allows our clients to enjoy a reach that is on par with that of Google. It means that we cannot only recognise consumers across devices, but also ensure we can reach them with relevant messages. This way we can activate a much larger audience pool for our clients than anyone else in the market.

Our reach boasts 6,000 direct publisher integrations across video, mobile and display. It also includes 3.3 million websites and more than 170,000 mobile apps. All this fuels 80 billion online interactions every day (1 million every second), which results in clients being able to persistently recognise and understand consumers at an individual level.

Next blog post, 6 April, 2016: ‘The 5 keys to connecting with real people: accuracy, persistence and privacy’