Moving Towards Audience-Focused Marketing
In the time that I’ve been working in digital marketing, we’ve seen huge shifts in consumer behaviour and what it means for us as marketers. I’d like to talk a little about some of those shifts and how you can ensure you keep up with the change.
“What”
In the early days our focus was driven by “what”. In a world focused around last-click attribution, everything revolved around “what” the ROI was, “what” keyword somebody came in on, “what” product they bought. We were captivated by the measurability and success of activities like organic and paid search and targeted our marketing accordingly.
“How”
In the last few years, our focus has switched to “how” — everything has become all about device. While I wholeheartedly agree that it’s important to offer great experiences on mobile, I worry that it’s become a little bit of a fixation that means we’re in danger of missing the big picture.
In almost every industry, we’ve passed the mobile “tipping point”, where over 50% of traffic comes via mobile devices, but we’re yet to see sales shift over in the same manner. Why is this? Our challenge is that while mobile is the most-used device, only a small number of generally younger audiences use solely mobile devices. In the vast majority of cases, cross-device behaviour is the norm — with many users researching on mobile devices and then purchasing on those with larger screens.
I would also suggest that the “how” is the result of other factors.
“Where” and “when”
“Where” and “when” are likely to be some of the biggest drivers of our focus, our aim and our intent. My needs at 11am on a workday while I’m at my computer are likely to be very different to 9pm at night, when I’m likely to be at home, searching on my phone or tablet device. My interactions with brands will be very different.
Most people are familiar with this data from Google, showing how device usage varies throughout the day — with mobile edging out desktop during the small hours and commute to work, before desktop then takes over during the working day, starting to dip around 3–4pm, as people head home from work, or onto the school run. During the commute home and the evening, mobile device usage soars and stays above desktop till the end of the day.
What does this tell us? That our “where” and “when” is going to be what determines the device that we use. We should be looking to understand more about the customer in these moments and then come to device as a secondary consideration — rather than starting out with it as our main focus.
“Who”
We’re very fortunate these days that it’s so easy to gather data on who our customers are. Data points like age, gender, location and interests are very accessible from analytics platforms, AdWords and elsewhere. We can use this data to inform who our customer is, but I would argue that the data is incomplete.
Keywords are still an essential part of our marketing because this audience data on its own isn’t enough and it helps us qualify a user’s intent. But we should be asking ourselves what else we can find out about our customers. Who are their family? Do they have kids? Grandkids? What do they do for work? How much disposable income do they have? What papers do they read? What’s their favourite TV show? Do they watch TV live, or do they stream on demand? Do they double screen? Digging in to all of this allows us to build out a properly-rounded profile of our customer from which we can do more.
It’s essential for us as marketers to really get into the detail of what makes our customers tick. We need to ensure that we can answer the three following questions:
- What’s important to your customers
- What motivates and drives them?
- What problems do they have, that your brand can solve
That third question is by far the most important question and the answers are likely to vary by segment of your user base. These answers should be what decides the marketing activity that you run and the creative messaging you put together to support it. Ecommerce giants like Amazon agree, stating recently at dmexco:
“But the [real opportunity] is how do you solve a problem for the customer all the way through their journey in a way that is helpful to them.”
“If you’re doing the right thing for the customer, that will come through.”
“Why”
Once we know what’s important to our customers and what motivates them, we need to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing in that specific moment. Why are they browsing? Why are they searching? Why might they be on your site? This leads us on the wider application of “moments” within marketing.
These moments represent our opportunity. Your ad may have been the event that got the user started on their journey, but it’s in the zero moment that the most of the decision making happens. By the time the customer comes to purchase, it may be too late — unless you’re one of several places a customer can buy a particular product from. So our focus should be on influencing the zero moment as much as we can — positioning ourselves for consideration when the customer thinks about committing.
How to deliver a high-quality cross-channel experience
By offering great experiences, you give your brands the best chance of being considered during the zero and first moments. What does a great experience look like? I think it has four key components:
- Is audience driven — focuses on the message over the channel
- Has a consistent “feel” across channels
- Gives the best possible experience on the device being used
- Is specific to the point of the journey that they’re at
Let’s look at an example:
This is a coffee brand who split their audience into 7 core segments, with a control group to compare against. While using the same black-and-white look and feel, they “personalised” the ad shown to each audience to make it relevant to them. The challenge for marketers is going to be finding ways to do this at scale — as having multiple messages for audiences depending their place in the funnel, the device they’re using etc, can be tough to do manually, or without the help of some sort of technology.
Use the right KPIs
While you can solicit active customer feedback from your customers about your advertising, there are easier ways to understand whether your campaigns are working as you’d hope. You just have to listen in a slightly different way — by using the right KPIs.
If you’re using sales and revenue as your sole KPI you risk damaging your campaigns — you can read more about this and the use of micro conversions in an article we published in Marketing Week. In brief, you should be using KPIs relevant to the right stage of the funnel, to quantify success for channel activity designed to target that stage.
Here’s some example channels:
And example KPIs:
Putting together your audience profiles
In the same way that you split your paid search keywords out into different ad groups, you should split your customers into distinct audiences, based on their “who” and “why”. Think about the different messaging these groups might need and don’t be afraid to split out further if the messaging needs to be customised. Beware of getting too granular though — as audiences which are too small aren’t useful and only create more work for you. Also bear in mind that creating these audiences is just a means to an end — you have to do something with them once you’re finished.
There’s a number of free ways to dig into your audience data:
- AdWords & Bing campaign & audience list data
- Google Analytics Demographic & Interest Data
- Facebook Page Audience Data
- Take email addresses & interrogate using Facebook Audience Insights
You can also pay to use platforms like YouGov to obtain deeper insights, getting more of the qualitative data and personality insights. Some display providers are also able to take your CRM data and enrich it with a number of other data points — further informing you about your customers.
When starting to put things together, it can be tricky as there’s so much data to start with. But begin with all of your site visitors and using a “family tree” method, start to drill-down. Perhaps split out your converters, then go by gender, age, device etc. Or you may want to start this process with device, then primary motivation, and go from there.
It’s worth doing this a couple of times to ensure you’ve captured all of the key findings. From here, try and describe your audiences and then humanise them into personas, with motivations, life-styles, pain-points and more.
Do the same with creative
As mentioned earlier, creating the audiences is just a means to an end. The bulk of the work comes in the next step when you use this same process to work out the creative and messaging you need to put together.
Starting with all of your visitors, take your core profiles and begin to think about when and how your message needs be personalised. In the below example we’ve begun with audience, then looked at device, point in the funnel and finally, creative format.
Feel free to switch things up and begin with funnel stage if you wish, or introduce factors like product, messaging (as you’ll need to A/B test), etc. Remember not to get too granular as you’ll need to actually create all of these variations!
Think sequentially
What’s sequential advertising?
Sequential advertising is when a series of ads are shown to the audience in a specific order and each message informs the next.
Sequential messaging has started to be increasingly used because nobody likes a hard sell — whether we’re interacting with a salesperson in a shop, receiving a cold call or we’re on a date — particularly in that final instance we want to try and get to know someone before deciding whether we want to take things any further. However in advertising, we always go straight for the sale.
We shouldn’t be asking potential customers to buy from us without any sort of context, or background, or affinity. We know customers are more likely to purchase when an affinity exists — it’s why Brand keywords perform better than Generics. With this in mind, think about how you might want to vary your creative to take advantage of a sequential approach.
The benefits of this method are as follows:
- Ultra-targeted & relevant
- Reduced ad fatigue
- More qualified traffic
- Lower cost per conversion
While this approach has been popularised by Facebook as they have a number of ad formats which lend themselves well to this approach, you can apply it across all of your digital marketing, by incorporating your Display and Paid Search ads into the planning process. What are the three stages?
- Stage 1: Introduction — introduce the brand or concept to the customer
- Stage 2: Teaser — tease what the brand has to offer and entice the customer to explore further
- Stage 3: The Hook — include a strong sales call-to-action
In summary
I hope that by now you’re convinced of the benefits of an audience-led approach! I have four key takeaways I’d like to leave you with:
- Move beyond sales as your KPI & last click as your model
- Create detailed audience profiles — use these as guides
- Customise your messaging by audience — no one size fits all
- Think moment & sequential — guide the user on the journey
I hope you found this helpful!
