People hate advertising—all forms of push marketing, for that matter It interrupts their favorite shows. It clutters their screens. It overpromises and underdelivers.
And, more often than not, it has nothing to do with their interests.
But what if there were a way to get people to like your ads and other messaging? What I'm talking about is not a gimmick. It's not a deal with the devil. It's relevancy.
Consumers don't mind ads that are relevant to their needs. In fact, an ad actually becomes useful when it's truly relevant. Relevancy simply means "The right message, at the right place, at the right time."
The following four commandments define how Ozone, our agency, keeps relevancy central to our clients' campaigns. Since we primarily work in the digital space, our tactics are measurable, actionable, and adjustable on the fly. But these commandments can be applied to offline marketing as well.
Relevancy Commandment No. 1: Know Your Customer
The more you know about your customer, the easier the remaining commandments become. Using information captured from your marketing database, Web analytics, social listening tools, and your CRM system, you can better understand...
- How, when, and where your customers buy from you.
- Whether your message is missing the right audience.
- What your customers are saying about your brand, what questions they need answered, and how they're interacting with your company's website.
Armed with this data, you can come close to a true 1:1 digital relationship, without assigning a unique salesperson to each customer.
Relevancy Commandment No. 2: Deliver the Right Message
Knowing your customer also allows you to deliver the most relevant message in the most appropriate voice. We focus on three things:
- Offer. You want customers to take a specific action, such as purchase what you are advertising to them, so your call to action must be clear. You should also offer what your customer actually wants: Don't try to sell home equity loans to college students.
- Tone and voice. Use the right tone and voice for your intended audience. Engineers can digest longer, more technical copy than a CFO who wants to know how things will affect his company's bottom line. You can market the same product to both, but via segmentation you tailor the message to resonate with each recipient.
- Format. People are consuming digital messages in ever more disparate ways. Using responsive design and planning, you can deliver a message specifically tailored to your customers' devices—desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile phone.
Relevancy Commandment No. 3: Get the Message to the Right Place