How do you know if your audience is in market for your product?

According to Valassis, 62% of consumers want to be targeted with relevant and timely ads. But how can advertisers ensure their ads are timely?

For many sales teams, the qualification of a promising sales lead comes down to the acronym BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, and most importantly TIMING. The same approach can be applied more widely to marketing. If a prospect is interested in your product (N), has enough cash to buy it (B), and is in a position to do so (A), but ultimately doesn’t need your product or service right now (T), the chances are your ad will be ignored. Marketers refer to this approach as moment marketing: the technique of targeting your business to consumers at the moment it matters – when they're already looking for you.

Trying to detect whether someone has a need for your product there and then can be tricky. Interest data is based on past behavior, but what that tells you is that the user was at one point interested in the category. Their need may have been satisfied - they bought that product they were looking for - and now they’re no longer searching for content around that topic.

So what data can marketers use to perfect the timeliness of their ads?

Moment Marketing Using Seasonal Events

A simple method for moment marketing is to map out your marketing calendar based on the different events and holidays scheduled throughout the year. For example, restaurants will always plan a big marketing push around Valentine’s Day and e-commerce retailers will always plan a big campaign in the run-up to Black Friday.

The problem with this form of moment marketing is twofold:

While seasonal trends would suggest you’re more likely to see higher levels of interest in this period, you can’t be sure that the user you’re targeting actually has a need for your product. It’s great that you have a microwave discounted by 50% but if the user is happy with the one they already have, they’re not likely to buy from you. It’s a form of impersonal targeting that relies heavily on consumer trends. That means the ads you’re serving could still go ignored by a large part of your audience.
Another problem is that if you’ve figured out that Black Friday is a good time to run a campaign, chances are all of your competitors will have too. That means that not only will CPMs be much higher due to the increased demand, but your ad could be drowned out by the competition. Ironically this could actually mean the ROI you generate from these seasonal campaigns will be lower than the campaigns you run outside of these periods.

Moment Marketing Using News Events

A different option would be to monitor news events around the world or “happenings” and, where there is a relevance to your brand, tailor your messaging and ads accordingly. This form of newsjacking has definitely been put to good use in the past and many brands have reaped the brand awareness results.

One example of this was Oreo’s “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” tweet which came during a power outage in the middle of the Super Bowl. Not only was the post retweeted 18,000 times, but the brand also received massive PR coverage in the news:

The issue with this form of moment marketing, or real-time marketing is that it relies on quick thinking and speedy implementation. In the above example, Oreo could never have predicted the power outage and they literally had 30 minutes to seize the moment. If they’d posted the tweet with the power back on, it would no longer have been relevant and it would have been widely panned as badly timed.

For this reason, most real-time marketing which focuses on news events is best suited to social media and to PR. Digital ad campaigns which require media to be bought in advance and content to be reviewed before it goes live would never manage to capitalize on the opportunity in time.

Moment Marketing Using Trigger Data

When our marketing clients tell us they’re looking to run timely campaigns, we always suggest our Triggerpoint segments. These audiences are segmented by life milestones, or “triggers”, that are personal to the consumer. These include:

New Movers
New Baby
College-bound Seniors/Parents
Newly Graduated
Newly Engaged/Newlyweds
Newly Retired

The above triggers are relevant for a huge range of products and services - moving companies, furniture shops, insurance firms, cruise companies, student loans, etc. Brands can be sure their products or services are marketed to users when they’re most likely to convert. Even better is when marketers layer their targeting, i.e. segment based on interest, demographics, and trigger points. This level of sophisticated audience segmentation enables marketers to highly personalize their ad messaging.