7 Ways to Segment Your Audience to Leverage Contextual Creative to Increase Brand Awareness
The key to maximizing your brand reach isn’t by spending more money on advertising. It’s about creating contextual visuals and ad copy that speaks to the individual motivations of your collective audience. Here’s how to do it. Listen in.
7 Ways to Segment Your Audience to Leverage Contextual Creative to Increase Brand Awareness
Hello, good afternoon, I’m Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining me today on the video podcast where we talk about digital marketing strategies to grow your business.
Today we are going to talk about seven ways to segment your audience to leverage contextual content to increase brand awareness. Why would you want to increase brand awareness? That is the biggest piece of the funnel when it comes to people who are in the market and thinking about making a purchase decision. The awareness stage is the biggest pool. And a lot of businesses make the mistake of trying to put one single piece of content or creative out there to try to catch fish. It doesn’t make sense and the reason it doesn’t make sense with one piece of creative is you can’t address and cover all of the motivation of why someone is going to make a decision. If you go and talk to your sales division or your service representatives or your member director or whoever it is that discusses face-to-face with your clients, if you were to go to them and say give me a list of the 8 to 12 different reasons why people have decided to do business with us. I bet you they could come up with a list and they can probably go on even more than that and come up with 20 different reasons. I think that is the first step in really taking a deep dive into the motivations why people make decisions.
1: Make a List
So let’s start with that. How we are going to segment the audience to really create this contextual message is where we are going to start. Number one we are going to make a list of of all the reasons why your customers do business with you. So it might include they’re afraid of missing out it, it could be that they care about their appearance and so they want to buy the latest watch or jacket, they want to make a purchase decision that they can feel smart about or they can save money or that can give them an advantage. All the different motivations, it does have to get into or do with our human behaviors and what drives us to be who we are. So you really have got to dig deep and create a comprehensive list.
2: Write Short Sentences or Questions
Once you’ve created that list of motivations, then turn around and write a short sentence that says “are you worried about whether or not you have the advantage when it comes to playing tennis? or are you worried about whether or not you have made the right decision when it comes to your mortgage?”. Create that sentence or question that addresses that very specific motivation or pain point. We’re talking about pain points, that people make decisions based on these pain points. They get to this point where they’re like “I must do something about this because…”. For example, “I need to go to the pool store because my pool is green. I didn’t put enough chlorine in, now I have to go get some Yellow Stop”. As a as a pool owner, I would create “are you tired of looking at a green pool?” and that’s a feeling, I’m tired of it. Once you’ve written a short sentence on each one, and again you need, 8, 9, 12, 15, 20 different motivations, write them all out right. And again you’ve got to talk to the people on the front lines and then create the question that speak directly to those motivations.
3: Find the Visual
Now you got your list of questions so you’re ready for number 3. You need to find a visual that communicates that same exact pain point. It’s a picture of a guy standing out and looking at his pool that’s green and scratching his head like “what am I going to do?”. Or you take a picture of a guy or a lady standing out in front of the a vehicle and she’s sitting there and looking at her car with a bunch of groceries in her hand and she’s thinking “I don’t have enough room for all these groceries in my car”. Really try to find that visual that connects with that motivation.
4: Find the Person in Your Organization to Represent the Brand
So you’ve made your list, made questions, found an image now here’s the next thing. Here’s where you need to get a little creative. Find the best person in your organization who has a great voice, who is good on camera, and have them ask those questions. Just speak right into the video and say “hey are you worried about whether or not your roof is going to start leaking when the next storm comes?”, if you’re a roofing company. Have them go through and ask all of those questions, all 20 of them.Then if your company services multiple areas you want to have that person get very specific with the geography. So “hey you know you live in Austin, Texas and are you worried about your pool turning green? Is your pool already green? Not ready for summer?” if you speak directly to, not only the location but then also add that very specific motivation you’re really doubling up. What happens is when I come across that kind of creative it speaks directly to me. And so the other reasons like for instance would let’s say landscaping, maybe I don’t care about that or maybe the motivation of having a spa for my pool doesn’t interest me but I am worried about it being a green.
5: Record a Video
Once you do that, record that video. Now you have creative photos and video you’re speaking directly to each one of those 20 motivations and you want to create a 45 second short video and again it doesn’t have to be young George Lucas quality. This is going on the social web so the more authentic and real it is the better.
6: Write a 1,000+ Words About the Issue
Then lastly now this is going to take a little bit of work, so on this one what we want to do is take those 12, 13, 14 sentences in questions and write an exhaustive 1000 words of reasons why and what you can do about addressing that issue and whether or not it has to do directly with your product. Really go deep into how you can feel better about when you do this. So take that thousand words and put it on your blog and LinkedIn, it’s great content.
7: Segment the Market Based on Motivations
So now I’ve got my story, I got my audio, I got my visual, I got my written word, and I’m ready to deploy my creative on Facebook and Instagram ad platform. I want to take 16, 17, 18 pieces of creative that I’ve done, so I’ve got still images and videos then I can break my audience segments in to locations. I can split it into female versus male and create all those different sets and put it all up in one ad campaign. When you do that Facebook ad platform will rotate those ads through. So maybe the first time I see the ad, you’re not hitting me with the very specific motivation that I have. The second one you do or maybe the third one you do but I’m not seeing the same ad over and over in an irrelevant context. You’re going to hit me with that very specific one.
And that my friends is the key to segmenting your audience and leveraging contextual creative so you can increase brand awareness. You want to observe those trends and adapt, pulling off the ones no one’s responding to and replace it with others or just kill them all together. Then start over every month, boom, boom, boom like clockwork. That my friends is the successful way in a modern digital marketing strategy that’s how you deploy it. It’s very simple. Again I am Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps. Thanks for tuning in and catch you guys tomorrow!