Unlocking Audience Insights

About the Guest

Jamie Moldafsky is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Nielsen. In her role, Jamie focuses on deploying best-in-class marketing solutions, engaging in impactful thought leadership, and protecting the brand reputation. Prior to joining Nielsen in 2020, Jamie was Chief Marketing Officer at Wells Fargo Bank, where, for nine years, she was responsible for the full scope of marketing, including global brand strategy and management, product marketing, media, research and analytics, meetings, events and sponsorships, and reputation.

Connect with Jamie Moldafsky

Key Takeaways

• Knowing who your audience is and what they need is job number one for a marketer.
• Understanding changes in behavior and attitudes and stratifying based on data such as industry and buying intent are the keys to segmenting your audience.
• Marketing should consider how to reach different population segments using data from both first-party and third-party sources.
• Machine learning combines individual behaviors and attitudes with raw data to get more predictive and scaled results.

Quote

“64% of them [marketers] say that social media is their most effective paid channel. The other interesting thing is around channels, also is that there’s not the same bifurcation there used to be, which is, you know, TV is for brand awareness, and digital marketing is for conversion… While that brand awareness is the marketer’s top objective, acquisition being secondary, there’s an intersection of those two that is critical. And so the general belief is that marketers have to engage both in the upper funnel and lower funnel together and then measure ROI across the whole funnel.” – Jamie Moldafsky

Highlights from the Episode

What should you know about your audience/target market? 

Number one is to pinpoint your audience. The marketing side is much broader, but it helps in understanding how to reach and understand those audiences. The key is to segment the target audience with information. Take existing clients, stratify them, and understand their behavior.

How do you segment your target markets?

Nielsen provides services from one-to-one to off-the-shelf solutions to help companies with their targeting. The most salient way to segment is based on what the organization is trying to achieve. When finding solutions, some data may not seem relevant, but it is essential to look at how it applies to particular clients. The key is to work closely with clients to provide the right level of granularity based on their industry.

What data do you need? What is the role of analytics? 

We need qualitative, quantitative, real-time, and time-based data. The main challenge is to stay relevant, right, and timely. This is done via social monitoring, listening through the customer service teams, acquiring real-time feedback from the salesforce, and talking to the clients directly. These efforts reflected in analytics allow for better decision-making in light of customer behavior and buying phase. The key is combining first-party data with high-quality third-party data for substantial intelligence and utilizing machine learning for predictability.

How do you give audience insights to the sales team?

At Nielsen, they are in the early stages of creating a more direct interface to the salesforce in the planning and engagement with their clients. The aim is to provide real-time data to answer who to sell to and what the salesperson needs to know.

How often are you re-evaluating your target audiences? 

There’s a need for the marketer’s perspective of what’s working and what’s not working. The crucial point is the core segments and the solutions. Organizations can focus on refinement. Besides this, marketers must consider reevaluating the segment itself and taking on new relevance.

Where (e.g. what channels) are you meeting your audience? How are you using the data/analytics to engage more intelligently?

Helping the advertisers and agencies to understand the whole cycle – knowing who the audience is, where to find them, identifying the offer, and looking into what happened in the offer is what is done at Nielsen. This information contributes to the media planning cycle. What matters more is using the tools wisely and figuring out what is helpful. According to the company’s annual marketing report, 64% of respondents said social media was their most effective paid channel. The intersection between brand awareness and acquisition is done by engaging upper and lower funnels and then measuring the ROI across these funnels.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

• Annual Marketing Report – Nielsen

Shout-outs

Satya Nadella – Chairman and CEO at Microsoft