When it comes to marketing, understanding who your target audience is, their product preferences, tastes, and even their specific behaviors are some of the premises for establishing a long-term relationship between companies and customers. However, these guidelines are not always implemented: according to theCustomer Engagement Report 2024, from Twilio, a data platform focused on customer engagement, 81% of brands claimed to have a deep understanding of their customers, but less than half (46%) of customers agreed.
Paula Klotz, media and growth manager at Alot, a martech agency specializing in building and managing brands with strategies aligned with AI,listed five main conduct to elucidate and reaffirm good communication practices. Confira:
- Know your persona
According to the specialist, when thinking about advertising, it is essential to know who you will be communicating to. "It's not enough to just know the target audience; it's necessary to understand the persona. Study her, go deeper than simply identifying the audience as women aged 30 to 40, from the B class, living in the South and Southeast regions, for example," says Paula, who explains that it is essential to understand their interests, motivations, pains, and with that, create strategies based on the behavior and peculiarities that each user niche has, bringing communication more focused on the users' needs and what the persona desires.
- Have clear and well-defined goals
"The clearer your objectives are, the easier it will be for you to develop an assertive strategy. Therefore, it is important that even when working on the sales funnel (the function that 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. Example: it is pointless to run an awareness campaign and question why it does not translate into sales conversions, since that is not the purpose of this action," he warns.
According to the manager, often, due to the desire for results and not understanding the best way to evaluate the campaign, professionals change the strategy midway, believing it may not be working, for example, the sales volume is not increasing, but the campaign running aims at brand awareness, which, although it impacts sales results, is something that will happen in the long term, and changing the campaign prematurely without analyzing top-of-funnel metrics can be misguided. "Aligning everything at the beginning and defining the goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) that will be monitored for each channel ensures that decisions are made more rationally and securely. This way, you do not harm the results of a campaign that is exactly fulfilling what was proposed by its format," he indicates.
- Select the channel according to your objective
When it is time to decide which channels the campaign should be run on, many companies often want to be on the channels that are currently "hyped," but it is important to stay alert: "see if the social network aligns with the strategy outlined and with the target audience you want to reach. For example: if the audience is INSS pensioners over 65 years old, in debt, TikTok is not the right place to impact them. Speaking of social networks, Facebook is more assertive because we know about their access to the channel." She explains that when assembling the channel mix, the triad is essential: Who is my audience? What message do I want to convey? What action do I want my audience to take when they are impacted?
- Build personalized messages for each persona
If before we talked about the importance of ad personalization, now we are talking about hyper-personalization. The user will increasingly need to identify with the ad and create an emotional connection with that advertisement so that the trigger and impulse make them pay attention. "The goal is for you to navigate through the sea of ads and distractions. The customer needs to be impacted and understand the exclusivity of that communication, so you become the best brand option for them to make a purchase," he explains.
- Do AB testing all the time
"After all these well-aligned steps, not being afraid to test is essential; only by trying new opportunities and approaches will your ads achieve greater success. No plan ever goes 100% as expected. There will always be points for improvement, and A/B tests show that in a controlled environment, you can discover new targeting, creatives, website journeys, and much more. Making a comparison to generate more insights and data and turning this into a new plan will result in excellent outcomes," he concludes.
