Leveraging Actionable Data to Qualify Your Audience

How a Discretionary Income Index can help refine your Marketing Objectives

It’s the most basic of marketing directives: you need to qualify your audience to know whether your prospects are in the market and can afford the product or service being offered.

The most efficient and effective way of measuring these attributes is to understand your audience’s discretionary income – or, the remaining cash a household has after necessities like housing, transportation, food, and education have been paid for.

Most discretionary income indices are based on a household’s investment portfolio, the theory being that net worth is also a measure of discretionary income. As it turns out, net worth and invested assets don’t effectively measure the expense side and, therefore, only deliver a one dimensional view of the household. To address this problem we developed the Semcasting Discretionary Income Index, or DII.

In addition to liquid assets and income, the DII accounts for home mortgage, food costs, education expenses, transportation, and taxes. The DII is taken into a third dimension, however, by factoring in and understanding head of household or dual incomes, number and age of children, length and cost of home ownership, and the state and neighborhood in which your audience lives.

We go to great lengths to tap into aggregated data from public resources such as the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the IRS, and unemployment reporting – as well as sources related to home transactions, education, and inflation. All of these sources and the results are updated monthly.

A key differentiator is that our DII Index is modeled at a neighborhood level using our patented process based on genetic algorithms. In order to maximize results at a granular level, the model calculations are stitched together from millions of local level analytical scores to provide the highest levels of precision and accuracy. Scored audiences are available as postal lists, or they can be converted to Smart Zones to enable audience targeting online.

A DII value is available as a Rank Percentage or as an Index where 100 represents the national average, and a value of 200 equals twice the national average. Using the DII index, your audience (colored green in our Smart Zones reports) is compared to the local average (in red), along with the number of Zones that are targetable and the number of people within those Zones.

See our DII in action by downloading a sample Smart Zones report, or learn more about Smart Zones by reading our Smart Zones overview.