Before a telecom or utility company launches a marketing campaign, they need to know two things: that a customer has viable access to the service, and that they have the appropriate financial profile to be a long-term customer.
Every household is likely to require telecom and utility services, but not every household is a viable customer. Marketing challenges come in the form of service area segmentation and, in some cases, hyper-competitive local markets. Even though a service has broad applicability, the marketing cost can be wasted when targeting is either too broad (encompassing the wrong trade areas or non-buyers) or too specific (lacking reach to qualified prospects).
In spite of broad customer potential, telecom and utility companies need to precisely qualify every audience based on service area geography and the key attributes that define their best customers.
The most effective approach in digital telecom and utility local marketing is to target from IP addresses. Based on the delivery points set by Internet Service Providers, IP addresses are assigned by specific service providers in specific geographic locations. In the case of telecom, only targeting the competitive service provider customers is simple and efficient. For a utility, the competitive targeting may require onboarding a physical address to determine the IP address of households or businesses in the local market. With data onboarding, it is also possible to define audiences around qualifying attributes tied to physical addresses, such as length of residence, household income, family composition, age, and more. Alternative methods, such as cookies or social IDs, lack reach (typically only a 35% match rate) and suffer from duplication (up to 7 to 10 cookies per anonymous user).
In hyper-competitive local markets, marketers should also implement “match back” strategies to check that their campaign’s impressions are reaching the customer list being targeted. Using IP matching to build your audiences inherently creates a link for deterministic attribution going forward. Whether the marketing is executed online, on television, through direct mail, or all of the above, the IP linkage exists to map which marketing channel is performing.
Semcasting Smart Zones® is a twice-patented IP targeting technology that makes the deterministic connection between ISP delivery points and known offline locations. Smart Zones can cluster consumers as households or businesses, neighborhoods, or postal areas. Any CRM list, trade area, or website visitor can be identified to their location-based prospect profile and reached across devices and channels.
Learn more about how Semcasting can define trade areas for digital telecom and utility IP targeting, transparently onboard audiences across devices, and match back campaigns to customer profiles.