Avoid losing the forest for the trees: personalized marketing in the building industry 

Because AI-powered tools and tactics enable granular insights and personalized marketing, businesses need to determine when to focus on the trees, and how best to grow the forest. 

At a glance:

• Data strategy must align your business objectives, media strategy, channel expertise and media-serving capabilities.
• In the right hands (and brains), personalized, granular data allows for flexibility.
• Five strategic areas that are key to effectively harnessing and interpreting your marketing data.

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In the competitive landscape of the building industry, where the need to generate leads and nurture customer relationships over time is exacerbated by long sales cycles and capacity constraints, leveraging customer data and analytics the right way is essential for business success. But what does using data “the right way” really mean?  

Personalization and the sales funnel 

With the tools and tactics available today, brands are able to get much closer to a point of true personalization in their outreach and engagement with consumers and leads. For example, user behavior can inform dynamic, individualized copy options, and a link can lead to a specific product based on the link-clicker’s viewing history.  

Consumers today expect to feel seen, known, and understood by brands – and this applies to both B2C and B2B business relationships. Marketers can now speak to individuals, not just representative audiences, and in an industry like building manufacturing, deep personalization can shorten the purchase funnel dramatically by making ads more relevant and likely to be seen and driving more qualified leads. It also can help deepen brand affinity and improve customer service and support.  

But with this great power comes great (analytical) responsibility.  

Individualized vs. aggregate data: what’s best for business? 

Faced with an abundance of granular data at their fingertips, marketing analysts face new challenges in extracting meaningful, significant results – results that will move the needle for your business. Insights at a granular level can be powerful, but if you get too granular, they become anecdotal. So how can we maintain that valuable specificity, but also aggregate our data to a point that allows for significant insights? 

There’s no silver bullet – crafting a robust strategy for data aggregation demands a tailored approach that aligns with your unique business objectives and media strategy, not to mention specific channels and media-serving capabilities. The good news is that personalized, granular data allows for flexibility – providing your analytics team with the ability to adjust their aggregation methodology over time.

Five focus areas

As we delve deeper, it’s crucial to focus on these five strategic areas that are key to effectively harnessing and interpreting  your marketing data: 

1. Demographic Cohorts 
   This is perhaps the most fundamental level within the list, and that’s not a bad thing. Your team is likely considering demographics as a part of their media strategy already. Aggregation by age, gender, geographic, income levels, or other demographic factors can provide valuable insights into broader audience trends which can help refine your strategy ahead of the next campaign.
2. Objective-Based 
   Objective-based aggregation takes a bit more of a strategic approach to analysis. Aggregating your data according to the overarching goals of your specific campaign, analysts can identify the effectiveness of different messaging strategies and creative elements. Understanding which themes resonate the strongest is beneficial for both your Media and Creative departments as they look to develop the next round of campaign materials.
3. Revenue/Conversion-Driven  
   We don’t advertise for the fun of it. Media budget comes from an expectation that it will generate more revenue than it costs, so a bottom-line focused aggregation method can be incredibly useful ahead of conversations with your leadership or client stakeholders. Which cohorts return the highest ROI? Are there any cohorts with a negative ROI?
4. Customer Lifecycle  
   High, medium, and low funnel. Awareness, acquisition, retention, re-engagement. Whatever your lifecycle or funnel looks like, aggregating data through this lens can provide insights into customer interactions at different stages. A nuanced understanding of the customer journey can assist in allocating funds into the stages that yield the best results, while reducing overspend in stages that may not need as much support.
5. Performance Metrics 
   Focusing on your media’s performance metrics like conversion rates, CTR, CPC, web sessions, your team can gain a clear understanding of the overall success of their campaign. While some aggregation methods (demographic, lifecycle, objective) allow you to glean behavioral and audience-based insights, performance-based aggregation is similar to revenue/conversion-based aggregation in the sense that it provides more insights into marketing effectiveness.

Whether your sales cycle is three weeks or three years long, whether your funnel is linear or more of a figure eight, your consumers expect individualized experiences at every step. The aggregation methods listed above not only allow for refinement as you test and learn but beg for it. This is where strategic marketing analysts come in – the right partner can help you determine when to focus on the trees, and how best to grow the forest.