The Challenge

One of the technology industry’s most well-known providers of laptops, desktops, servers, data storage and protection, and more, reached out to Harte Hanks for help locating their target in-market customers. With the crowded, fickle, and price-sensitive nature of the consumer electronics category, finding customers early in their buying journey was proving a difficult task for the tech giant.

Being able to identify customers and prospects that are showing buying signals and who are actively searching for content related to the products and services they have to offer, while early in their buying journey, was imperative. We needed to create a solution that would allow the company to utilize advanced targeting, segmentation, or a trigger for a timely and relevant campaign, thus leading the customer through the buying journey to their purchase, faster.

Harte Hanks has partnered with the company for over four years, delivering a robust data services program, including data management, data cleansing, data hygiene, and data enrichment. That has translated into tens of billions of records generated, processed, and delivered each year.

Our Insights

Harte Hanks’ Audience Finder solution allowed us to identify customers and prospects that show buying signals and are actively searching for content related to the client’s products and services.

To achieve this, Harte Hanks can track content and topics that individuals search for and consume across a vast network of websites. When a user is searching for and engaging with content that aligns specifically with their products and services (i.e., product names, competitor products, solution areas, etc.), the individual is flagged and their data is captured, enriched with profile, and demographic information and appended to the client’s customer file or supplied as a prospect record

There are several applications and use cases for this “Audience Finding” approach both from a B2C and B2B perspective. Here, we will spotlight one such use case for the Laptop and Desktop/PC market.

Our Approach

Harte Hanks created a program for the US market to identify up to 100K customer or consumer prospects each month for the client, that are in an active buying cycle for a desktop or laptop solution.

Utilization of this solution allowed our client the ability to aggregate/build custom data audiences using keywords, phrases, terms, brand names, competitor names, product names, and services. Depending on number of key words used, the audience volume varied between a minimum 900K to 1.4 mill or more contact names with email addresses, every month.

All search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) were bypassed – those are essentially black boxed to most of the market.  What was tracked is what happens after the search. The expressions or keywords entered by the consumer were compared to the relevancy of the website the consumer navigated to. The Audience Builder utilized natural language processing technology and determined the main content of a web page the user landed on. The content of the web page was then compared to the keyword search criteria the user entered. An affinity score was then applied based on how contextually relevant content of the web page is when compared to the user’s search criteria.

A variety of details were captured to identify and target these individuals based on brand, product, service, etc. that the consumer was reading about on the site they visited. We ran a POC with selected keywords for several months, which consistently generated remarkable results.

The Results

Laptop

1.5M

Distinct records captured every 30 days

Desktop

900K

Distinct records captured every 30 days