Ad Relevancy Isn't Static - Build Flexibility into Your Content
A spin-chilling halloween tale: a costume based on an outdated pop-culture reference
Creating content and copy that is relevant to your target audience is a no brainer - it improves results (and means you spend less). But a lot of SMEs miss out by not maintaining relevancy throughout a campaign’s lifecycle. Today, I’m going to talk about building relevancy into your content and copy strategies from the start, and how to tweak that information throughout the campaign to improve results.
Start with Your Audience
At the start of any content project, you’ll be creating a customer profile (or audience research doc). It’s all the information about your audience you’ve found out through conversations with your client and from your independent research (their likes/dislikes, the tone of voice they’re familiar with, the platforms they use etc.) compiled into one messy document.
This customer profile doc is great because it gets you thinking like your target audience - and while compiling it you’ll likely have some ideas about the types of content they might engage with and the most appropriate tone for communicating with them. Information in this document will form the basis of your content strategy, and will also help you pinpoint certain triggers for when copy and content should change.
Some of the most common triggers are periods of the year (e.g. Christmas) - customers react positively to ads that reference these triggers if they’re appropriate to the product. But triggers really could be anything happening that’s relevant to your customers and product; Brexit, general elections, weather, sports… there are cases for changing your campaign’s wordy words based on those triggers.
Let’s look at a basic example:
You’ve been working with a high-end restaurant to create a locally-focused awareness campaign (using Google display ads); the restaurant’s customers care about quality, so you’ve created content that shows its produce is organic, locally grown and fresh. Suddenly, a global pandemic hits (there’s our trigger) and the restaurant can no longer host customers - but it can deliver ready-to-cook meals.
Our target audience still cares about eating good food but assumes restaurants are closed, so we need to adapt our message to show that our client is still open for business and that we can deliver the restaurant experience to your home. We can (and should) reference the pandemic in any campaign running, and we can adapt (or change) our content to give clear instructions on how simple and easy it is to cook the meal in your kitchen.
The client’s competitor is offering the same service but is using the same old awareness ad. Who wins in this scenario?
Research Informs Message x ∞
If we know our audience well enough, we can predict how they’ll react to certain situations. In our example above, we know the customer still wants good food and the restaurant experience, so we highlight our offer, which is the next best thing. Most importantly, we tweak our copy and content to reflect this change in circumstances.
While we can’t plan for global pandemics, we can use our customer profile as a reference point when questioning the relevancy of our campaign at any given moment. And we definitely should use our customer profile to plan for campaign tweaks throughout the year based on our trigger points.
With our restaurant, we might want to tweak copy and content according to the seasonal menu changes - it works because it references the freshness of the produce and implies it’s locally grown. Likewise, if the restaurant’s customers are predominantly parents, we might reference the weeks before the school summer holidays; it’s your last chance for some alone time before six weeks of punishment.
Remember, by keeping those relevancy triggers in mind when building your content/copy strategy you’ll be planning for better results throughout the campaign (and you’ll be ready for the unexpected).