Coming out of the pandemic, brands in the retail and charity sectors have been faced with renewed economic challenges. Interest rates are at their highest level since the 2008 financial crash, driving additional costs throughout retailers’ supply chains and shrinking margins. Meanwhile in the charity sector, 1 in 10 people reported they decided not to make a one-off donation to charity because of the cost-of-living squeeze, while 19% said were considering cutting back on their donations to cover their household bills.
Ultimately, both consumers and organisations have less cash to splash, so every pound spent on marketing and fundraising campaigns must deliver a return. This means reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time is more vital than ever, and it all comes down to one thing: personalisation. The more communications, products, and services are tailored and relevant to a specific audience, the likelier they are to spend money on that brand.
That’s what the Sagacity-Medialab partnership will deliver more targeted, data-driven campaigns that are based on insights about brands’ actual target audience. In this blog, we look at the specific marketing challenges facing retail and charity sectors, and how the Sagacity-Medialab partnership will enable brands to overcome them.
Millions of Customers and a Multitude of Channels
The challenge for brands is two-fold: understanding who their target audiences are, and how best to reach them. Organisations hold information on millions of customers and potentially hundreds of products. The sheer volume can be overwhelming and makes bringing this information together to build a complete picture of customers a huge challenge. Broken processes and a lack of internal resources also mean data isn’t captured in an effective and consistent way, resulting in customers having multiple records that are not linked. Combined, these data gaps make it hard for brands to understand, market, and appeal to specific groups of customers.
Then there’s the challenge of how to reach audiences. Many brands still rely on a mass-marketing approach, despite their target audiences often being very varied. This is particularly the case in the charity sector, where marketing resources are increasingly stretched. Tackling the engagement problem requires a multi-channel strategy, with personalisation at its heart. Yet, even once channels are chosen, measuring the success of different marketing campaigns against one another, and applying learnings to future campaigns is challenging without being able to gather the relevant performance data in one place.
A Complementary Partnership
Data holds the key to solving the questions of who brands should target, and how to do so. Yet, many brands lack the internal expertise and resource needed to join the dots. This brings us to our new partnership. Sagacity’s datasets and services, combined with Medialab’s campaign measurement and planning tools will enable organisations to meet strategic marketing goals and ensure every consumer is treated like an individual.
Some of the key benefits include:
- Access to more campaign channels and better measurement tools: Clients will be able to extend the highly responsive and targeted campaigns they already run into more digital channels – such as TV, Instagram, and YouTube. Clients will also benefit from Medialab’s Marketing Intelligence Platform, Apollo, which provides real-time data to better measure campaign performance.
- Richer data to target customers: Through access to Sagacity’s consumer and geographic data, Medialab will enable clients to target certain demographics more precisely. Examples of these datapoints include information on customer interests, what issues resonate with them, who they live with, wealth and health, affordability and indicators on household spend.
- Joint product launches: Sagacity and Medialab are working on a re-permissioning program to help brands gain clarity on what contact permissions they have for different media channels. The product would assist brands to gain permissions across more channels and aid with compliance.
To find out more about Sagacity’s approach to customer data management, read this article.
Scott Logie, Chief Commercial Officer at Sagacity
