How to Use Data to Build a Well-Timed Marketing Campaign

With the right data, you can predict the future and drive even better performance from your limited marketing budgets. Here's an example of how to use data to build a well-timed campaign, specifically for back to school, using Bing Ads and AdWords.

Author
Date published
July 15, 2013 Categories

With the right data, could we predict the future and drive even better performance from our limited marketing budgets? Yes, I think so.

As digital marketers, we already understand “seasonality” directly impacts our marketing campaigns – it can drive more volume and higher ROI. But we aren’t always going deep enough.

For holiday campaigns, much has been done to break down consumer behavior into smaller, predictable and measureable events – Black Friday or Cyber Monday for example.

Why can’t we do this for other seasons like back to school or the summer travel season?

What I’m about share with you is an example of how to use data to build a well-timed campaign, specifically for back to school – but the implications extend well beyond this campaign type, retail, or search marketing.

Pieces of a Well-timed, Potentially Predictive Back-to-School Campaign

Start by combining two key ingredients:

By August 5, all of Hawaii’s 180,000 K-12 public school students will be back at school. But New York City’s 1.1 million K-12 students won’t be back at school until September 9. That’s a big difference in time, geography, and demographics.

Combine varying school start dates with insights like the fact nearly 72 percent of parents typically shop for their children within 1 week to 1 month before school starts – we now have our foundation.

Your Hawaiian advertising campaigns may need to start July 5th vs. August 9th for New York City. Of course, you could start advertising earlier for either Hawaii or NYC, but with limited resources it’s important to know when to focus (and not to focus).

When Parents Start Shopping for Back-to-School

In 2012 the National Retail Federation (NRF) asked when parents planned to shop for the then upcoming school year. The survey is a great benchmark if you don’t have your own research or buying behavior. What does the survey say?

What are the implications for our digital marketing campaigns?

When Do Kids Really Go Back-to-School?

The first day of school is determined by the school district, or state governments. There are nearly 120,000+ public schools and an estimated 15,000+ public school districts in the US – luckily, this data is already available for a fee from MCH Strategic Data. But if you increase the profitability of your campaigns by 5 percent, 10 percent, or more by making more intelligent decisions – would this data be valuable to you? I’d say yes.

If we plotted the number of students by their first day of school, it would be spread out over weeks.

It turns out, the first day of school can vary widely from district, city and state – this explains the different color bars above. Some states like Hawaii or Texas have a statewide uniform start date. Within states like California, major cities have different start dates – Los Angeles starts August 13, but San Diego starts September 3.

The image below shows how the first day of school varies across U.S. for the upcoming 2013 school year. The taller the column, the more students enrolled in the district, watch for the patterns.

Now Applying the Data to Your Campaigns, Starting with Bing Ads and AdWords

We can see distinct geographic patterns from MCH Strategic Data’s first day of school data. There are countless tactical combinations, but I wanted to list a handful:

There is opportunity to optimize for timing, and coordinate between all of your media buys. These are just a few ideas, but don’t limit your creativity.

That’s it: Think Ahead & Optimize Your Timing

You’ve already done all the work to build out a campaign, but optimizing your timing may take your campaign to the next level. These are insights I am sharing with large retailers right now and thought you might benefit from it. It starts with data.

As always, no idea is perfect so you need to validate any strategy with the truth of your own experience and business. There are a lot of moving parts, but hopefully it inspired you to think about your campaigns differently. Breaking down seasonality into small predictable and measureable “micro-events” may help you predict the future.

P.S.: You can apply this same concept and exact data set to map out school winter breaks or the last of school for family vacations.

Exit mobile version