Know your audience: Claritas helps businesses enhance marketing campaigns with geospatial data

Is your marketing campaign hitting the mark? Are you receiving the expected return on your marketing investment? For decades, Claritas has been helping companies find their best prospects, improve marketing execution and deliver superior ROI. A foundational element of their success has been achieved through their use of geospatial data from TomTom.

Keys to a successful marketing campaign

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends, “As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing.” Marketing campaign costs vary greatly depending on the campaign type and scope. An advertising campaign can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000,000. The average social media advertising campaign costs $500 to $6,000 per month, while a direct mail campaign will cost over $1,000 to send a simple postcard to a thousand recipients.

Given these costs, maximizing return on investment is imperative. The two most important factors in any campaign are: 1) the message, and 2) finding the right target audience. The job of identifying the best message is within your control – but finding the right audience is where you could consider working with a third party that specializes in knowing more about who your best prospects and customers are.

With knowledge comes wisdom

Marketing is personal by nature. So, the more marketers know about their current customers and potential prospects, the better. Likewise, customers and prospects are looking for a solution that meets their specific needs. Let’s look at some common examples:

• Financial Services – I want to know the location of a mature population to target my retirement planning campaign, or where can I find an abundance of college age residents where I can target my college loan marketing campaign, or I need household income data to support my wealth management marketing campaign.

• Insurance – I’d like an understanding of the types of insurers covering a specific area so I can target them for my competing offer campaign.

• Retail – I need a view of households with young children to target my Christmas toy marketing campaign.

• Energy/Utilities – I need a profile of energy types per household so I can target those more likely to purchase my fuel.

• Entertainment – I need an audience list of teens and younger adults to target my movie and concert discount campaign.

The challenges are two-fold: 1) identify your marketing campaign’s target audience, specific to your industry and customized to meet your demographic criteria, such as household incomes, composition, age and culture, and 2) map your target audience to a geographical location.

Build from the ground floor up

Claritas is a data-driven marketing company that helps companies find their best prospects, improve marketing execution and deliver superior ROI. Claritas offers over 8,000 syndicated audiences built from over 10,000 demographic and behavioral attributes. Using their platform, Claritas helps businesses to unleash the potential of their first-party data by appending Claritas data and building custom and look-alike audiences based on specific business goals. They provide solutions for multicultural audience identification, email marketing services and multichannel measurement solutions.

Once the audience is defined, the goal is to better understand where they’re located. Location insights allow applications to draw boundaries and to target marketing campaigns to those geospatial target areas. Claritas partners with TomTom for access to maps, points of interest (POI) data and boundary data for census and postal boundaries.

• TomTom maps provide a geospatial reference allowing users to quickly visualize, interpret and analyze demographic data.
• TomTom administrative areas extend the functionality of the street map by providing boundary representations of census districts down to the most detailed levels.
• TomTom’s Postal District boundaries follow their streets and other features to ensure optimal representation and overlay.

As depicted above, Claritas leverages TomTom geospatial data to take block group level data estimates to produce demographics and segmentation distributions, rolled up to various geographic levels. This information can then be projected on a map to give clients a geospatial reference.

Hitting the target

Several years ago, Claritas selected TomTom as the geospatial foundation for their segmentation solutions. A team of data scientists reviewed cartographic data from several providers. This research determined that TomTom was the best fit for their solutions by providing optimal data quality, freshness and coverage.

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Our experience with TomTom has been very positive overall. Their data is easy to work with and highly accurate. As a result, our clients stand to benefit with better targeting.

Cort Irish

VP, Marketing & Communications at Claritas

Use of TomTom geospatial data is now integral to various Claritas processes. Claritas clients have been the direct beneficiaries of this business relationship, through enhanced target audience insights and improved ROI on their marketing campaigns.

The future of segmentation

Claritas envisions continued investment in technologies to build highly precise and predictive target audiences. They continue to evolve their solutions with email and multichannel execution, as well as measurement capabilities. There will be a continued focus on bringing a closed-loop suite of solutions to help marketers achieve success at each point in the marketing spectrum.

Ultimately, Claritas segmentation solutions, bolstered by TomTom geospatial data, will help companies find their best prospects, improve marketing execution and deliver superior ROI.