When it comes to marketing, understanding who your target audience is, their product preferences, tastes, and even their specific behavior are some of the premises for establishing a long-term relationship between companies and customers. However, these guidelines are not always implemented: according to the Twilio Customer Engagement Report 2024, 81% of brands claimed to have a deep understanding of their customers, but less than half (46%) of the customers agreed.
Paula Klotz, media and growth manager at the Alot agency, a martech specialized in brand building and management with AI-aligned strategies, outlined five main behaviors to elucidate and reaffirm good communication practices. Check them out:
- Know your persona
According to the specialist, when thinking about advertising, it’s essential to know who you’re communicating to. “It’s not just about knowing the target audience, it’s necessary to understand the persona. Study them, go deeper than just determining the audience as women, 30-40 years old, from Class B living in the South and Southeast regions, for example,” points out Paula, who explains the need to understand their interests, motivations, pains, and create strategies based on the behavior and peculiarities that each user niche has, bringing communication more geared towards the users’ needs and what the persona desires.
- Have clear and well-defined goals
“The clearer your goals, the easier it will be for you to develop an assertive strategy. Therefore, it is important that even when working on the sales funnel (which identifies the flow followed by leads), you have your primary and secondary purposes, as well as knowing which channels and metrics you will use to evaluate each of them. For example: it is useless to be running an awareness campaign and question why it is not reflecting in sales conversions when that is not the purpose of that action,” warns.
According to the manager, often, due to the eagerness for results and not understanding the best way to evaluate the campaign, professionals change the strategy halfway through, believing it may not be working. For example, Sales volume is not increasing, but the campaign running aims for brand awareness. Although it impacts sales results, it is something that will happen in the long run, and altering the campaign prematurely without analyzing top-of-funnel metrics could be hasty. “Aligning everything at the beginning and defining the goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will be monitored for each channel makes decisions more rational and secure. Thus, you do not harm the outcome of a campaign that is exactly fulfilling what was proposed by its format,” she suggests.
- Selecting the channel according to your goal
When it comes time to decide on which channels the campaign should be run, often companies want to be on the channels that are in ‘hype’, but it is necessary to stay alert: ‘see if the social network aligns with the strategy outlined and with the audience you want to speak to. For example: if the audience is INSS pensioners over 65 years old, in debt, Tiktok is not the appropriate place to impact them. Speaking of social networks, Facebook is more assertive, as we know about their access to the channel’. She explains that when putting together the channel mix, the ‘trinity’ is essential: Who is my audience? What message do I want to convey? What action do I want my audience to take when affected?’.
- Build personalized messages for each persona
If before we talked about the importance of customizing the ad, now we are talking about hyper-personalization. The user will increasingly need to identify with the ad and generate an emotional connection with that advertisement so that the trigger and impulse make him pay attention. ‘The goal is for you to be able to dodge the sea of ads and distractions. The customer needs to be impacted and understand the exclusivity of that communication, so you remain the best brand option for him to make a purchase,’ she explains.
- Do AB testing all the time
‘After all these steps are well aligned, not being afraid to test is essential, only by trying out new opportunities and approaches will your ads have greater success. No plan goes 100% as expected. There will always be points of improvement, and AB tests show that in a controlled environment, you can find new segmentations, creatives, journeys on the site, and much more. Making a comparison to generate more inputs and data and turning this into a new plan will reflect in great results,’ she concludes.
