Check out five tips for assertive communication within marketing.

When it comes to marketing, understanding your target audience – their product preferences, tastes, and even specific behaviours – are essential for establishing a long-term relationship between businesses and customers. However, these guidelines aren't always implemented: according to... Customer Engagement Report 2024From Twilio, a customer engagement data platform, 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 brand building and management with AI-aligned strategies. I have listed five key behaviours to clarify and reaffirm good communication practices. See below: 

1. Understand your persona.

According to the expert, when considering advertising, it's essential to know who you're communicating with. "It's not enough to simply know the target audience; you need to understand the persona. Study them, delve deeper than simply defining the audience as women aged 30-40, from Class B, living in the South and Southeast regions, for example," points out Paula, who explains that it's necessary to understand their interests, motivations, and pain points. From this, create strategies based on the behaviour and unique characteristics of each user segment, leading to communication that's more focused on the needs and aspirations of the persona.

2.  Have clear and well-defined goals. 

The clearer your objectives, the easier it will be to develop a decisive strategy. Therefore, even when working on your sales funnel (a function that identifies the flow followed by leads), it's important to have your primary and secondary goals, and to know which channels and metrics you'll use to evaluate each. For example: it's pointless to run an awareness campaign and question why it's not leading to sales conversions, if that wasn't the intended purpose of the action," warns [name/source]. 

According to the manager, often, driven by a desire for results and a lack of understanding of the best way to evaluate a campaign, professionals change the strategy mid-course, believing it might not be working. For example, if sales volume isn't increasing, but the campaign running aims to build brand awareness, despite impacting sales, this is something that will happen over the long term. Changing the campaign could be premature if the top-of-funnel metrics aren't being analysed. "Establishing everything at the outset and defining the objectives and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will be tracked for each channel leads to more rational and secure decision-making. In this way, you don't undermine the result of a campaign that's precisely fulfilling what its format was designed for," she indicates.  

3. Select the channel based on your objective. 

When it comes to deciding which channels to use for a campaign, companies often want to be on the "hype" channels, but caution is needed: "check if the social media platform aligns with the strategy and the target audience. For example: if the audience is INSS pensioners over 65, with debts, TikTok isn't the right place to reach them. Speaking of social media, Facebook is more effective because we know they have access to the channel." She explains that when creating a channel mix, the triad is essential: Who is my target audience? What message do I want to convey? What action do I want my audience to take when impacted? 

4. Build personalised messages for each person 

Previously, we spoke of the importance of ad personalization; now we're 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 cause them to pay attention. "The goal is to help you navigate 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," they explain.

5. Continuously run A/B tests

After all these well-aligned steps, it's crucial not to be afraid to test. Only by trying new opportunities and approaches will your ads be more successful. No plan ever unfolds exactly as expected. We'll always have areas for improvement, and A/B testing shows that in a controlled environment, you can discover new segmentation, creatives, journeys on your website, and much more. Making comparisons to generate more input and data, and transforming that into a new plan, will reflect in excellent results," he concludes.