5 Marketing Tips for Rising Above Election Year Noise

For marketers, rising above the noise in the midst of high-profile world events (such as the Olympics) or high-powered political campaigns (such as the U.S. presidential election) takes perseverance, strategy, and skill. Here are five tools and tactics we use to ensure our client campaigns retain their reach and resonate with target audiences during extraordinary times:

1. Identify Early Interest: When noise levels are especially high, it’s more important than ever to pin down the warmest prospects – people who are likely to be interested in your offerings because they’ve visited your website. Using strategies such as IP address reverse company ID look up and contact estimation, which we offer to our clients, you can go a long way toward identifying these website visitors. Once you have a better idea of who they are, you need to determine how to best engage them. We advise a B2B2C approach (read on to find out more).

 

2. Reach Prospects at Work and at Home:  As it gets more difficult to rise above the election year noise, it is critical for brands to fine-tune and double down on their reach and engagement strategies. B2B2C data linkage is the answer.

 

Recently, OMI announced a B2B2C data linkage service that enables marketers to connect with prospects and customers on the B2B and B2C channels they use the most, whether at work or at home. This new offering was developed in response to the dramatic increase in the number of people working from home, which has accelerated the growth of the B2B2C or “universal person” movement. This movement sparked a paradigm shift that calls for marketers to get a more complete view of their prospects – across their B2B and B2C profiles -- to engage them more effectively.

 

As an example of B2B2C data linkage, a marketer can send direct mail to a B2B contact’s home address while also engaging with them on their business email using the same offer to reinforce the message.

 

Our new service spans 140 million business contact records, with residential/consumer linkage on 85 million of those records. It links B2B attributes, such as email, firmographics and job title, to B2C attributes, such as the prospect's LinkedIn profile, demographics and residential address. This contact data can be customized for each client’s needs and then leveraged to fuel campaigns across channel points including direct mail, email, social, and programmatic, where available.

 

The service offers both company- and contact-level social URLs, MAIDS, mobile phone, and a range of LinkID overlays available for client use in reaching prospects on their preferred channels. Go here to find out more.

 

3. Find Ready-to-Buy Prospects: Moving beyond simply identifying website visitors, you can scale out your search to those prospects who have already shown an interest in what your brand offers with intent data. Here’s how it works: Potential customers actively search for solutions to their challenges every day—browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers, etc. This online behavior reveals your prospects' intentions to buy a specific type of product or service. Intent monitoring tools track the behavior, enabling you to find those potential customers even before they find you and your solution.

 

From a marketing perspective, intent data aids in identifying early opportunities and drives more effective lead scoring. It uncovers serious buyers actively researching solutions --- the prospects who are most ready and most likely to buy -- providing a huge advantage over cold outreach. This With intent data, marketers can focus their efforts on high-potential leads and engage in more targeted marketing efforts – which is critical during a “noisy” election year. Another benefit is more efficient use of advertising budgets.

 

Drilling down a bit further, intent flags are used as part of our B2B2C data linkage service and are based on client-selected market keywords that zero in on prospects whose recent digital behavior (browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers) indicates interest in the client’s offerings. Go here for more information.

 

4. Repeat Exposure: Repeat exposure to your defined targets can also give your messages the added attention they need with a politically-distracted audience. At OMI, we offer a “one-two punch” strategy that leverages triggered programmatic and email. By placing programmatic ads in front of prospects who have previously engaged with email content, and vice versa, you maximize the chances of conversion. Using a tailored approach to triggering, you gain increased efficiency, scalability, and targeting capabilities. Because there are privacy laws at play, execution of this approach is complex, making specialized expertise around anonymized data and other factors a requirement. Our team is uniquely qualified with that expertise.

 

5. Audience Media Activation: Today’s media landscape is complicated. During an election season, digital advertising real estate is more scarce and ad buys become more competitive. This means there is a bigger chance that your ads may end up on a made for advertising (MFA) site or positioned adjacent to a potentially offensive ad that doesn’t align with your mission. When advertisers work with trusted agency partners who have the expertise and tools to navigate the complex programmatic landscape effectively, these risks are greatly reduced. In addition, the right media activation partner has your best interests in mind. They provide transparent measurement and reporting and focus on getting your message in front of real people and the right people – not bots or MFAs. Talk to our team about our media activation services. We are a trusted partner to Fortune 1000 firms.

 

It takes a multitude of tools and all the expertise you can bring together to rise above the noise this summer and into the Fall. Connect with our team for assistance. We offer all five of the services and tools above and we want nothing more than to see our clients succeed this year and beyond.