Yahoo! Wants to Connect You with Offline Consumers, Too

The art of marketing is all about connections, and few relationships are more meaningful (or profitable) than those between a consumer and a marketer. However, running an online marketing campaign is, in many ways, quite different from marketing offline, and for companies trying to market in both spheres, managing connections on and off the Web is a demanding job.

Realizing that all of these relationships are important for business, many companies have focused their efforts on using the Web to track down the most relevant consumers out there.

Yahoo! is looking to get in on the action and help out businesses, and the company has dug deep to combine "cutting-edge science and access to a massive store of consumer data" to develop two new technologies that tie together a business's online and offline worlds. A newly enhanced version of Yahoo!'s Consumer Direct and the introduction of Proximity Match intend to help marketers elicit meaningful results by targeting relevant consumers, by both interest and location.

The new updates to Consumer Direct, the company's purchase-based targeting and measurement solution, include features that let marketers target large, specific consumer segments and measure the impact of their online campaigns on their offline customers by combining in-store purchase data with Yahoo!'s online user data.

Since that takes care of purchasing trend information, that must leave the Proximity Match solution to help target location-based consumers (as if the name didn't give that away). This technology will make it easy for businesses to find potential customers "according to the distance between their home address" and the retail or business location.

"Our rich understanding of online consumer behaviors enables marketers to reach a precise audience that is both receptive to their messages and large enough to drive meaningful results," says Yahoo!

The information provided by both Consumer Direct and Proximity Match is culled from a large stockpile that includes Yahoo!'s own data, advertiser data and data from the company's partners, all of which provides a wide view of consumer behavior and location-based information to help businesses pinpoint the most relevant consumers.