With so many options and tools at marketers’ fingertips, it’s easy to get lost in the possibilities of adjusting a targeting strategy for better campaign outcomes. 

To understand an audience—especially a hidden one—means first understanding the people behind the data. Having insight into what products or services individuals are buying when they make their purchases and how frequently they engage in transactions can help marketers make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies and tailor their offerings to better meet the needs and desires of their consumers.

Purchase data offers a wealth of information on how shoppers’ buying behaviors, patterns and preferences ultimately lead to a sale. In a tight economy where every advertising dollar counts, insights from purchase data can unlock valuable ROI for marketing teams.  

Here are three ways marketers can leverage insights hiding in purchase data to identify and target new audiences.

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1. Purchase-Based Consumer Profiles

Marketers with access to permissioned purchase data have the power to create relevant campaign messaging and drive deeper brand engagement. It starts with better, more distinct segmentation led by insights found at the receipt level. 

Purchase data can be segmented and analyzed based on spending behavior, preferences, demographics or psychographics. Within Attain’s platform, customers can also be segmented by the recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) of their purchasing patterns and by how customers engage with other brands.

These insights can be leveraged to build consumer profiles and target audiences based on specific demographics and affinities—everything from Gen Z to multicultural shoppers, and pet lovers to world travelers, or something custom to fit a brand’s specific needs. 

Say your brand is a challenger fast food brand taking on household-name heavy hitters. Purchase data shows that over the past six months, as your brand awareness has grown, your recent shoppers that are most at-risk to pick a competitor over your brand demographically are more likely to be Hispanic/Latinx, female and Gen Z. Armed with this knowledge, you may consider activating a targeted digital campaign focused on bringing these specific buyers back to your brand.

With a better and real-time understanding of an audience’s behaviors, demographics and affinities, marketers can get creative quickly to find and activate new audience segments, paving the way for successful campaigns.

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2. Competitive Spending & Cross-Purchasing Behavior

Purchase data holds clues that marketers can use to identify patterns in their target audience’s purchase behaviors. From frequency of purchases to the timing of seasonal trends, marketers can identify hidden audiences based on customers who exhibit similar spending behavior.

Attain’s Conquesting and Cross-Purchasing insights can be used to track trends like how often consumers spend, and which competitors they spend with. Marketers can also use these insights to determine where there is overlap in spend between their brand and a competitor brand. 

For example, during the back-to-school shopping season, an athletic and footwear brand may see that its biggest competitors the past two seasons have been online fast-fashion brands that have advertised discount prices and stylish options. Using this information, the brand may look to go toe-to-toe with top fast-fashion brands using targeted back-to-school messaging when advertising.

Over time, these insights can lead to unlocking a hidden, net new audience of buyers and opportunities to win over consumers. 

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3. Uncover Regional Spending Habits

While most brands have enough first-party data to identify where their brand is strongest geographically, they often lack detailed insight into where their competitors are strongest. 

Using Attain’s RFM Insights, marketers can dive deeper into competitive datasets by region. This allows marketers to discover hidden audiences by identifying the regions where their competitors have a strong presence, which can be used to aid a competitive conquesting strategy.

For example, a beauty brand might discover their competitor has a strong base of brand champions in the northeast, but consistently underindex among customers in the central U.S. regions. This brand may opt to plan a multi-city digital and out-of-home campaign targeting regional shoppers in the central U.S. to capture even more market share, while also competitive conquesting in the northeast.