Building your brand’s consideration campaign is a crucial step for companies trying to catch the eye of prospects throughout the sales process. Programmatic advertising is a key component of making digital impressions on your customer base that will push them toward your product or brand. The consideration phase of the sales funnel is far and wide the most difficult to optimize against. However, it isn’t impossible, nor should you feel intimidated by the prospect of creating a sharpened consideration-oriented programmatic campaign. Dstillery is here to help and break out some of the key points you should remember when building your mid-funnel campaign. 

Understanding customer intent in your consideration campaigns

The first thing to understand about the consideration phase of the sales funnel is that it’s based on customer intent. What do we mean by intent? We know that people like to take vacations. However, the idea of a vacation means different things to different people; some want to end up on a beach in Thailand or check out a national park, and others might want to take a  cruise in the Bahamas. Targeting these people based on age or gender is ineffective and outdated. Great consideration campaigns are built around why people vacation. 

With vacation top of mind, let’s say you have a campaign goal to get people to consider vacationing in Yellowstone National Park. Aside from being a beautiful national park, ask yourself, why would people want to visit Yellowstone? When we dove into understanding the Yellowstone experience and began matching it with our audience taxonomy, we built a base of eight audiences that appeal to the Yellowstone visitor. 

  • Hiking Enthusiasts
  • Camping Enthusiasts
  • Rock Climbing Enthusiasts
  • Sightseeing Travelers
  • Outdoor Enthusiasts
  • Craft Beer Enthusiasts
  • U.S. History Buffs
  • Nature and Outdoor Book Readers

Mapping out a digital journey

But there is more to it than just identifying the habits of these people in our audience taxonomy. We also have to understand their habits from a domain perspective; where do these people go on the internet, what websites interest them, and where is their digital journey most likely to take them? By working closely with our data partners and utilizing partnerships with opt-in data providers, Dstillery can weave domain data into our Consideration Solutions and help further map customers not solely based on assumed interest but also by their digital journey and online intentions. 

Intent-based marketing doesn’t manifest itself insidiously for a customer either. For example, someone looking at hiking boots may then be served an ad for Yellowstone National Park. Their adjacency to the subject of your campaign based on their internet habits is that it improves Dstillery Considerations Solutions’ effectiveness and thereby creates a microcosm based on your customers and their digital experiences and serves them ads that will ideally push them toward a real-world action. You can build this out further too – we know that people who enjoy nature also tend to enjoy craft beer and breweries. Your consideration campaign can grow in reach to include these people as well and serve them ads that usher them down your funnel. By understanding your consumer’s activities, you can continually grow your consideration campaign and optimize it based on what groups are showing interest. 

Using data to optimize

The consideration phase of the campaign is also a key point in which to hone your brand’s message and creative. In this phase, you can see in a very clear way who is engaging with your campaign message and optimize against it. You can create or re-work messages in real-time to guide your narrative. For example, you may notice that American History Buffs are starting to take an interest in Yellowstone and may begin to optimize campaign creative toward that and shift away from Craft Beer Enthusiasts.

Consideration is far and wide the most impactful portion of the sales funnel and the one where most marketers tend to optimize and re-optimize the most due to how critical it is to capture customer interest. That said, it’s important to note that its the place where your investment in programmatic campaigns goes the longest way as it connects passive interest to real conversions. 

Interested in using Dstillery audiences in your consideration campaigns? Let’s chat.