2 steps to better ad engagement

When it comes to understanding your consumers, there are many factors to consider.

Regardless of demographics, a consumer’s interests and personality type can determine how they are likely to react to certain products, services, and types of messaging, and – most importantly – whether are likely to engage with the content that you are presenting them with.

Every individual is different and blanket messaging results in low engagement and click-through rates. While it may appear cheaper to spend less time on segmenting your audience and developing your content, it actually is counter-productive in getting results due to consumers becoming frustrated when presented with irrelevant marketing – many admit that they are less likely to purchase from a brand that continually market to them in this way. (get stat)

Let’s go through the process of increasing engagement without increasing spend by creating hyper-targeted ads.

Step 1 – Get to know your audience

There’s very little to gain by segmenting audiences demographically anymore. Perhaps you could get away with this minimalist approach a few years ago when personalisation wasn’t so rife but these days, consumers expect more so – to garner their attention – you have to give more.

The factors to consider when segmenting audiences are seemingly limitless, think beyond age, gender and where they live (you can obviously factor these in too) towards interests, hobbies, personality, frequent locations and much more.

When we say ‘interests’, we don’t just mean are they interested in yoga for example, we mean are they fanatical about Bikram yoga, are they a potential customer (frequent class attendee or beginner), or are they an influencer (perhaps a popular yoga teacher with a mass following.)?

Now you have the ‘what’, consider the ‘how’. How would these consumers respond to your messaging and how can you tailor your approach for maximum engagement? Segmenting by personality type can allow you to determine who will respond to messaging emphasising socialising and who would prefer informational ads over aesthetic ones.

There are services out there that do this hard work for you – all you need to say is the kind of audience you want and the type of product or service you are marketing and boom you can get the hyper-targeted audience that will deliver a much higher engagement rate at a lower cost-per-click than our typical campaign based on keywords.

Step 2: Create your content

Now you have your audiences, you need to tailor your content to each persona. Whether you’ve settled on 3 audiences or 10, relevant content for each is crucial to the success of your campaign.

Let’s use the example of a kitchen-wear retailer. You want to know what product to present and how to present it. Consumers living in a city centre flat, interested in artisan coffee and vegan, gluten-free cooking probably won’t respond to an ad in the same way that consumers with large families living in the countryside with more interest in convenience.

With this advanced insight you can market a vegetable spiralizer to the first audience with emphasis on health benefits and playing on the trend and a slow-cooker to the second audience with content highlighting the convenience of cooking multiple portions in one pot and allowing it to cook while you go about your day.

There you go. Make these two steps part of your targeted marketing process and watch your engagement increase…