Once you’ve begun building your target audience, you should always be expanding your customer base and finding more buyers that want your product or service. One of the most effective ways to generate and maintain valuable customer connections is to constantly learn from and use relevant consumer data. Here are three data-driven strategies that will help you reach more customers so you can keep growing at a competitive pace:

1. Use your first-party data to build lookalike audiences

Your first-party data, or the data your organization collects first-hand, will always be one of your organization’s most valuable resources. When it comes to reaching more audiences, your first-party data is a great roadmap. It’s likely that the audiences you’re trying to reach share similar traits with the audience you’ve already identified. These are called “lookalike audiences” and they’re the first audiences you should be targeting.

Analyze the data you already have about your customers. New customers will most likely look similar. Do you notice trends in age, geographic location, or gender? Do you notice patterns in responses to certain types of messaging or products? Use this data as a springboard when diving into new audiences.

For instance, if you have found that a certain product sells better to women in a certain age bracket, you might use that insight to market that product to similar demographics in new areas. If you’re a cosmetic company and you notice you have a large vegan demographic, you might use that information to append your audience with more contacts that share similar values (contacts interested in vegetarianism, animal rights, all-natural products, etc). 

2. Augment your data to hone in on audience preferences

The internal data you’ve collected on your current audience’s engagement habits and buying behaviors is extremely valuable. To gain even more in-depth insight into who your audience is and what they are looking for when they engage with your brand, you should consider enriching your first-party data with additional information. With augmented data from outside sources, enterprises are able to build hyper-personalized experiences for their buyers throughout the buyer journey. 

As marketing becomes increasingly personalized, buyers are expecting you to know them and curate messaging and products based on their preferences. Incorporating data from external sources into your internal data is the best way to fill any gaps you might have in identifying who your audience is and getting to know them on a deeper level. 

For instance, you might enrich your existent audience data with age data. Using our cosmetic company again as an example, you might be aware that a larger percentage of your cosmetic customer base is female, but you might not know the age bracket that your products are most popular in. You can use your enriched age data to find which products are more popular for 25-35 year olds and which are most frequently purchased by 18-25 year olds. With your new insights, you’ll be able to focus your product marketing campaigns on more specific target audiences.

With better insight into audience attributes, priorities, and behavior, you have a better opportunity to create customized communications that will prove to your audience that you understand and know how to meet their needs and desires.

3. Create an omnichannel strategy

It’s obvious that you’ll want to always be searching for new channels, but it’s also important to make sure all of your channels are also working together. This is called omnichannel marketing and it’s a tried-and-true strategy. In fact, campaigns that use three or more channels have a 90% higher retention rate than single-channel campaigns.

Omnichannel marketing is a way to ensure that your current audience and the audience you are trying to reach all receive a unified message that reflects their relationship with your brand. For instance, your cosmetic company might run an Instagram advertisement for getting a percentage off of products if customers sign up for a rewards program. People who watch and interact with that ad might sign up for your reward’s program on your company’s website. By signing up, automated emails could be triggered that offer discounts, deals, and more. Through all of these channels, you’ve managed to expand your reach considerably. 

Now you can collect and analyze data from all of these channels, creating a comprehensive view of your buyers that will help you personalize even more effective messages and interactions for your audience in the future. 

Use Narrative’s data collaboration platform to extend the reach of your custom audiences

You can extend the reach of your audiences using Narrative’s data collaboration platform. We offer quick and easy solutions for data onboarding, data enrichment and identity resolution. You’ll be able to append your customer profiles with additional attributes, find new sources of information about your customers, and match data between platforms and applications. You’ll never pay for the same data point twice, and we ensure that all the data you acquire is quality, transparent, and relevant.

Want to start reaching more audiences? Give our experts a call.