Let machine learning find your best audience

Do you know why you prefer a color instead of another? Why you buy a cereal box instead of a biscuits pack? Alternatively, even why you buy a brand instead of its competitor?

Our values and attitudes drive all of our choices. These are psychographic data, useful to driven a successful marketing strategy.

We are going to explore the different kind of data that can best drive our marketing choices and discover more about technology leveraging artificial intelligence to extract value from these data.

The right data to build your marketing strategy

Building the right marketing strategy can have a significant impact on your company sells, reputation, brand positioning and, yes, also on you.

Either If you are in charge of finding the right words for your next ads or of configuring the campaign there is a thing that you need above all: the right target to address.

The right audience to target is one of the most important things to kick-off your marketing strategy because everything, from the content to the results, will depend on it.

The basics are that you have to find as much information as you can to shape your "target persona," that set of data that we can sum up into two macro categories:

Demographic data, which includes gender, age, income, geographical info, if they are married or not, the work they do.

Psychographic data that include opinions, behaviors, attitudes, interests, values, activities.

To set it simple we can say that demographic is the "who" you are and psychographic is the "why" you do something. Including buying activities.

We buy things that match our lifestyle, which make us happy, that let us feel good, or better than others. Even if we need something, nobody says that we need exactly that product.

For example, you need to have something for breakfast.

Why you buy cereals instead of biscuits?

Because you are interested in your health, you want to stay fit, and you pay attention to the fat concentration in the foods that you consume along the day.

Even if we need something, nobody tells us nothing about the brand! Nevertheless, we buy from a specific brand because of reasons that go beyond quality and costs. We buy from a brand where we recognize our values, attitudes, and way of life.

How, as a marketer, I can discover my target attitudes?

Where can I find information about "why" people buy?

How then can I give you the right ads able to move your buy?

Our preferences are similar in the World to those of thousands of other people. People behaviors can be profoundly reduced in a few similar patterns. The real question should be: how I can recognize the same pattern in big noisy data to win my marketing challenge?

Finding common patterns thanks to machine learning.

Machine learning to find meaningful data

Companies have tons of data. Today problem is more about how to see the value from big data coming from too many sources than collecting new data.

Psychographic data are not a new entry in marketing, what that is changed is the way of extracting and categorizing the valuable information. The old way is a long A/B testing performance, questionnaires, manual analysis. In this article from Wordstream you can find several traditional methods to gather psychographic data.

Reading it, you can clearly understand how many time this activity may require. Today automation is the reply to time-consuming activities. Today data mining + machine learning are the solutions to gather psychographic data for an effective marketing strategy.

Data mining is the process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. (Wikipedia)

Data mining analyze people behavior, finding a familiar pattern in the customer journey as well as in people preference, pulling them from social networks discussions, shares and interactions. A marketer is not a data scientist but well knows the importance of significant data to set up contents and ads campaigns. That is why psychographic data are so necessary for a marketing strategy. Psychographic marketing works than from the underlying assumption that people that share interests, preferences, behaviors also share same buying behaviors and can be clustered to buy same products or to react to the same ads positively.

Why then machine learning?

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence in the field of computer science that often uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to "learn" (i.e., progressively improve performance on a specific task) with data, without being explicitly programmed. (Wikipedia)

Analyzing massive amount of psychographic data algorithms of machine learning make categories segmenting attitudes of people sharing similar profiles. Data segmentation is more than just statistics; it’s about finding your understanding of your clients and choosing the right way to interact with them. Assigning a profile based on their demographics and psychographics you can improve how you reach your target audience.

You know your audience better, and you can do more effective buyer personas that are based on a considerable amount of data instead of a few interviews. You can understand how your target audience spends the time along the week, working moments and personal activities. You can align your marketing with the best prospects to reach. You get automatic suggestions on the right contents to use, the right images, the best moment to get in touch and interact to improve conversions.

Thanks to artificial intelligence you can now make predictions about the impact of your marketing activities on your audience, maximizing results.

About the author

Ester Liquori is CEO and co-founder of You Are My Guide, a smart company providing A.I. based services for marketing and sales optimization.