🤓 Bite-Sized Knurd: Marketing’s over-reliance on data has made it easy to forget the real-life humans behind your target audience. It’s time for a paradigm shift in how we develop strategies across all sectors, especially in non-profit and political spaces, to create more humanized campaigns.
Our hyper-connected digital world has helped transform marketing and communications. But like most things, the benefits of digital come with moderation.
Data is a prime example.
It’s mind-boggling to quantify the amount of data that is now being passed through the internet on a daily basis or even by milliseconds. From 2010 to 2020, the amount of data generated worldwide increased by 5,000%. It’s grown so high that we’re now measuring it based on zettabytes (79 zettabytes of data in 2021 to be exact).
It’s hard for our brains to even understand the sheer volume of that much data.
Our Over-Reliance on Data
Naturally, once we had the data, we couldn’t help but use it. It seriously transformed marketing. We were now able to craft more strategic and targeted marketing campaigns. People’s search histories, browsing behaviors, purchases, and more were scooped up and used to better target advertising.
Data has allowed us to do many incredible things that Don Draper would never have dreamed of. Just to name a few, it has allowed us to:
- Reach the right people at the right time which allows organizations to not waste their ad dollars on uninterested audiences.
- Develop more personalized creative messaging for a narrow set of your target audience through audience segmentation.
- Reach more people who are more likely to “convert” whether that means they sign up for your emails, donate, or take another desired action.
- Better understand which advertising tactics work and don’t work for your goals through analytics and reporting.
- Create better and more consistent messaging by using data to reach similar audiences across different advertising channels.
- Reach people who are already familiar with your organization or campaign to try to get them more engaged.
All of these benefits of data are helpful and have made it much easier for smaller organizations to use advertising effectively.
However, data is not helpful when organizations are only or mainly reliant on data and ignore the other key components of developing marketing strategies.
The one component we miss when we’re over-reliant on using data is the human being on the other side of the screen.
Shifting Back to the Humanity of It All
Our over-reliance on data has skewed how we operate in the world. It tells us which shows streaming platforms should produce, what news is important, the best marketing strategies for a brand’s customers, and what candidates should run for office.
But humanity is not a data point.
We are whole, full human beings.
That is why we need a paradigm shift in how we develop strategies across all sectors, especially in non-profit and political spaces.
The massive amount of data online was lauded as the miracle cure for everything. But data became the poison pill when we lost sight of the people behind the data. Many strategies have become flat and lack the courage to meet the moment.
Looking forward, we should be building strategies with data as a guide that can be filled in with stories, conversations, imagery, and life.
Filling in Your Data Skeleton
Askeleton is only as good as the flesh, brain, and muscles that fill in and make a person unique.
Instead of leading with data, modern marketers should look to use data as one of their tools to humanize their audience leading to more effective marketing campaigns.
When it comes to audience data, there are two main categories:
- Demographics: Criteria to define a person based on physical or societal factors including age, income level, race/ethnicity, education level, etc.
- Psychographics: The human characteristics that make up a person or audience such as their interests, habits, attitudes, emotions, and preferences.
While most advertisers will lean toward demographic data, psychographic data is much juicier. By better understanding our audience’s interests and emotions, we can begin to fill in the picture of who these people are. We begin to understand their hopes, motivations, and what they are fearful of.
Leaning on psychographic data also has the benefit of being more equitable. Rather than looking at audiences based on race, gender, ethnicity, or class, we can build a fuller picture of people regardless of their demographics, thus creating broader coalitions based on interest.
Why Personify Your Audience?
By using audience data this way, it becomes the guide that helps us fill in the rest of the picture with other tools like creative, internal stakeholders, and community conversations.
This has the dual benefit of an organization reaching the people who are more likely to be interested and a better, more relevant experience for the target audience. For marketers, it makes your job easier down the line when you take on a human-first audience strategy from the beginning.
- Better Messaging: If you know who you’re talking to, you’re much more likely to have a message that speaks to that audience. The better defined your target audience is, the easier it is to develop a messaging strategy that will help meet your goals.
- Less Wasted Time & Resources: Focusing on a group of people, rather than everyone, helps an organization spend less marketing dollars to talk to the right people and less time trying out ways to communicate that don’t work.
- Keeps You Focused: A target audience allows your team to apply guardrails to your communications so that your message is focused and consistent, which ultimately increases the awareness of an organization and what it stands for.
Non-profits and political work are intrinsically tied to people.
Their decisions will shape and impact people’s lives in countless ways. By developing your strategies through a lens of understanding your audience’s beliefs, goals, worries, fears, dreams, and more, we can build better systems that support us rather than continuing to look at the bottom line.