Resonate has debuted a platform that measures consumers’ online motivations to help agencies better target campaigns across mobile, social and video.
Dubbed Resonate Analytics for Agencies, the software is based on 4-year-old technology that statistically models people’s behavior online against in-depth, survey-based knowledge about their personal values to track how those values motivate the way they move through the purchasing journey.
Bryan Gernert, CEO of Resonate, argued today’s targeting and analytics technology doesn’t address the reasons people seek out products and brands, whether consciously or subconsciously.
“We built the company to figure out how to engage people based on these things because we found that that’s more powerful than interests or demographics or simple behaviors,” he said.
Resonate wants to more scientifically bring human and personal psychology into measuring advertising and marketing interactions. By linking behavior to personal values — in the case of Resonate, that means tracking more than 1,300 measurable values in their foundational surveys of more than 100,000 people per year — the company can add much greater insight than standard behavior-based analytics.
“Behavioral data alone is backward-looking and it doesn’t understand the reason why you did something,” said Marc Johnson, CMO of Resonate. “Somebody might have visited a site that sells running shoes — but did they visit that site because the running shoe was all about the latest carbon fiber because they value innovation? Or was it because that running shoe was made by Alexander Wang and they’re really fashion-forward? What we’re doing is matching behavior with what they say their motivations are and then modeling that to scale.”
Previously designed primarily for in-house marketing analytics teams, Resonate has already been put through its paces by a number of companies to achieve lift in very specific ways. A large home-improvement retailer was able to use the tool to track the motivations of consumers on its site in order to build better landing pages directed at the key attributes such as independence.
Another customer, an appliance manufacturer, was able to understand that the core motivations of customers organically visiting the site had to do with cost effectiveness and reliability. Because the manufacturer felt it had tapped the market for those attributes, it then used Resonate to target customers based on innovation motivators of closeness to family and peace of mind. Doing so allowed it to uncover a new audience, driving incremental traffic.
The latest incarnation of the platform has been tweaked to help agency strategy and analytics teams develop and track targeted creative campaigns, said Scott Blacker, VP of product management for Resonate.
“What we’re really doing is taking the power of this understanding and turning that over to the agency so they can use that knowledge and that data to figure out what creative would be better for resonating with a specific audience,” Blacker says.”It will help them understand what audiences look like, why they are motivated to buy the product and how organic visitors vs. paid search visitors look different so agencies can drive performance.”
