All Things Audience: Pre & In-Market, Data, and Curation

First things first, we defined the customer journey of a typical car buyer. These are the behaviors and actions a customer takes before and after making a vehicle purchase, and each vertical has a unique purchase cycle based on how often that product is purchased. For automotive vehicles, this purchase cycle starts on the day that person bought their previous car (3-5 years ago) and ends on the day they purchase their new vehicle. The purchase cycle is 3 to 5 years. This entire time span is important when considering how we create our audiences.

Within this purchase cycle, there is a Consideration Window that reflects the entire period of time when a customer is considering and transacting a purchase. For automotive consumers, this is roughly 90 to 0 days until purchase. While a customer is within this Consideration Window, it’s appropriate to meet them with the correct messaging and correct volume of marketing. Our recency and frequency optimizations, along with our audience components are very closely tuned to this behavior. Still, this window of consideration can be further divided into cohorts, or markets, for more granular targeting.

Within this Consideration Window, we recognized that there were specific cohorts of buyers that reflect different points in their customer journey. In our case, a cohort is a time sensitive grouping of users, reflecting a current point in their buying behavior. Customers enter and leave these cohorts as they advance through their customer journey, moving from the awareness phase, to the consideration phase, to the purchase phase. These cohorts have a revolving flow of users, where users are constantly being added and eliminated based on specific behaviors and traits. This buying process is time sensitive, meaning a user does not stay in the awareness phase forever, eventually advancing to the consideration phase, then purchase phase as they approach their purchase date.

Recapping the Customer Journey
Consumers undergo a customer journey that reflects their path to purchase, and every vertical has a unique purchase cycle for how often their product is purchased (for automotive purchases, it’s 3-5 years). Within this purchase cycle is a consideration window (90-0 days from a vehicle purchase), which is divided into specific time cohorts that reflect a user’s exact behavioral phases up until purchase (awareness, consideration, and purchase). This division is important, as each cohort receives different messaging and a different volume of marketing.

With the foundation laid, we can dive into EMG’s cohorts, which we also call our audience groups. We define our EMG audience groups as (1) Pre-Market, (2) In-Market, and (3) Conquest.

1.  Pre-Market (Awareness Phase):

Pre-market consumers are at the top of the sales funnel, in the awareness stage of their journey to vehicle purchase. They are roughly 90-31 days away from buying a car. Here, EMG looks for life events that would trigger a new car purchase — new job, new baby, moving — and looks at automotive data — age of current vehicle, lease expiration — that trigger a new car purchase. Although they are in the awareness phase, many are not consciously aware they will need to buy a car in the next few months. We target them before they even know they need a car.

This market group is often overlooked because it is the farthest phase from purchase. In actuality, pre-market individuals are the most powerful tool for marketers because they are highly influenceable and particularly open to processing the advertisements during this phase. Unlike in-market groups, they are not yet closed off to a select few vehicle brands or models they are considering. Creating brand awareness just before and as they enter their “Consideration Window” is the most optimal time to influence the actual downstream behavior because this marketing creates a subconscious connection to and memory of the vehicle, all before they are aware they are in-market or being targeted.

2.  In-Market (Consideration Phase):

In-market consumers are predictably 30-0 days away from purchasing a vehicle. These consumers are in the consideration stage of their vehicle purchase journey, meaning they are highly transactional and moving quickly down the sales funnel. These could be individuals moving over from our pre-market segments, or brand-new individuals detected. In-market consumers are exhibiting behaviors that have been tested and confirmed to be highly predictive of an impending vehicle purchase, such as actively seeking vehicle information, applying for financing, exploring trade in options, etc. Here, EMG uses automotive data (from Cars.com, Autotrader, Edmunds, etc.), the dealership’s 1st party website data, and location data (dealership visitors) to find users rapidly approaching their purchase date.

3.  Conquest (Consideration & Purchase Phase):

Our third audience cohort are conquest consumers, who are predictably 7-0 days away from purchasing a vehicle. These consumers are a part of the in-market audience group but have indicated that they are interested in competitors’ vehicles. We identify these individuals from location data that tracks targeted consumers’ visits to other dealerships of the same brand. We target the competitors’ customers to “conquest” or take their customer’s purchase.

Audience Segments — Looking Within the Audience Groups

The fun doesn’t stop there. EMG’s audience groups are composed of many underlying audience segments. Audience segments are smaller groups of users that EMG tests and then uses to construct an audience group. This can be compared to biology, where multiple chromosomes (audience segments) make up one DNA strand (audience group). A pre-market audience group might have 20+ segments of users from our trusted data providers to encompass all pre-market behavioral groups.

We can’t forget our many in-market audience options. With EMG Audiences, dealerships’ targeting options get the most granular. From class – Luxury or Economy – to segment – SUV or Truck – to New and Used and even EV targeting, EMG has it all. Any audience segmentation that EMG has deemed impactful to performance is included so dealerships have a direct line to their exact audience.

Now onto the data! EMG uses 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data to mirror the automotive customer journey from trusted data providers — Experian, S&P Global Mobility, Edmunds, Oracle, and more. All of these audience groups’ users, and every underlying segment, has been regression tested with 40+ million dealership arrivals from the last 5 years, ensuring that these segments are consistently generating the highest conversion rates. This is only possible because we have a closed attribution loop where we can deterministically credit each dealer walk-in to a targeted impression (from a singular audience segment). This data tells us exactly which audience segments are over and underperforming, allowing our audience collection to be further refined.

In this audience optimization, we manually test thousands of audience segment combinations, sold both over the counter by one provider and custom curated by EMG from dozens of data providers. Through this process, we have filtered through and identified the top 0.2% of all available automotive audiences which most accurately and predictably generate dealership walk-ins and online leads.

The constant review and refinement in our curation process has resulted in the highest performing audience targeting possible in the market today, 8.5x the national average. Curation just doesn’t get more detailed than this.

EMG’s audience configuration and optimization set our automotive campaigns apart from other streaming specialists. Buying programmatically for over five years (a substantial head start over many streaming advertising specialists) has allowed our audience optimization and curation to become extremely refined, including only hyper-performing audience segments in our audience configuration that have been successfully regression tested in thousands of automotive streaming campaigns. This level of data curation takes time, energy, and expertise that EMG’s data scientists have allotted to provide our dealerships with the most highly predictive auto intending audiences that drive the most conversions every time.

To gain access to the top .02% of available automotive audience segments, get started today.