The impact of an ad is tied to how close the marketer can get to the moment when a consumer makes a purchase decision.
The value prop behind many new first-party-data-based advertising platforms, often lumped generally into retail media, is that their data makes this type of “moment marketing” possible. Brands that collect their own first-party data can create very strong partnerships.
But while Walmart, Kroger and the biggest CPGs duke it out at the top of the market, smaller companies with strong connections in very niche categories are in on the trend.
Kubota Tractor Corporation has plenty of first-party data on customers who are likely to need its line of residential tractors and lawnmowers – namely, people who live on properties with a lot of land.
But to capitalize on the trend of people moving from cities to rural locales during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kubota needed to reach people who were actively looking to make such a move. That’s where Realtor.com’s first-party data came into play.
Kubota, working alongside digital ad agency Goodway Group, created a custom integration with Realtor.com’s native advertising tool to target people who were browsing for homes in rural areas.
“We wanted Kubota to be top of mind with these folks, so that when they’re ready to buy equipment they would choose Kubota and go to our dealers,” said John Lee, the brand’s senior marketing director.
Data dive
For the native integration, Realtor.com users would be served ads if they had browsed properties matching Kubota’s targeting signals based on information specific to property listings on the platform, such as location, acreage and whether the property is connected to well water or city water.
When Realtor.com spotted someone with the right targeting criteria, users would see a custom interactive widget that prompted them to learn more about caring for the property using Kubota’s equipment.
Suggestions for what Kubota equipment would best suit a given property were based on Kubota’s own first-party data. That data was derived from the Kubota website’s “Help Me Choose” feature, which helps customers pick the Kubota product that best fits their needs. The design of the custom widget integrated into Realtor.com’s search function was based on this “Help Me Choose” feature.
In addition to native placements on Realtor.com, Kubota and Goodway Group also matched the two first-party data sets and third-party data sources to model lookalike audiences for programmatic targeting on the open web. This data graph was used to target customers after they had purchased a home, rather than during the house-hunting process.
Geotargeting
Realtor.com’s native advertising tool was also a data source for Kubota, said Chris Dixon, senior director of client partnerships at Goodway Group. It was useful in identifying areas of the country with a potential influx of new homebuyers before the migration trend became obvious.
“They have access to the National Association of Realtors’ data and survey information, so they have signals as to demand levels and where those [migration] events were taking place,” Dixon said. “That allowed us to be efficient.”
Ads could also be geotargeted to users who were browsing properties near Kubota dealerships.
“We got the benefits of a national brand-building opportunity and also made direct connections to our dealer websites,” Lee said. That’s also a stronger attribution play, he said, because it accounts for traffic to the Kobuta website and local dealerships.
Measurement
Measuring the success of a native platform integration can be tricky.
Kobuta looked at how often customers opened the custom Kubota widget on Realtor.com and how they engaged afterward. They can also compare the programmatic campaigns to other campaigns that aren’t modeled on the Realtor.com first-party data.
Realtor.com also created benchmarks for comparison to previous custom widget campaigns it’s run with brands before. That data showed the Kobuta widget was opened three times as often and had twice as much total engagement.
The campaign demonstrated that tried-and-true marketing approaches could be adapted to today’s data-driven marketing ecosystem, Dixon said.
“There’s a reason brands have stuffed coupons inside change of address packs at the post office forever,” Dixon said. “But we took this classic approach and did it in a more efficient way by using data to connect Kubota with the people who matter at the right time.”
