How well do you REALLY know your audience?
Running a campaign without Audience Intelligence and Personas...
It’s 3:45pm on a Friday and, as Marketing Manager, you’ve just been asked to create a new marketing strategy to promote Jazz Night at Wrigley Field.
What’s your first step?
Identify the audience. Who’s into jazz? Who’d buy a ticket?
Step 1: Scan Your Database
So you scan your records of past customers (using spreadsheets (!)) looking for any trends. Who came to jazz night last year? Did they come to other games or was that the only one? Did they come alone or with others? Who were the others? Maybe you even ask Google for jazz demographics.
You know more than anyone the power of audience intelligence; it’s the most vital preparation in any campaign.
That’s why you isolate the target demo before coming up with copy, creative, or even strategy!
Step 2: Filter Customers
At the end of your research, you’ve created an audience segment or archetype. Men over 50. After all, that’s who made up >50% of last year’s crowd. You’re using guesswork and gutcheck, but you’re right, right?
So you’ve got your target segment, where you’ll invest the majority of your efforts for the event.
Step 3: Campaign Development
Now you spend all weekend coming up with creative methods of informing your targeted segment.
You share your plan with Creative, and instruct them to design images and videos that would appeal to that segment. You may also enlist influencers and celebrities who appeal to M50s+ to help promote and drive ticket sales. It’s pretty much set. Just need to set the budget and hit “Go!”
Step 4: Set Budget
You’re given a six-figure digital ad spend for a two-month lead. At least half of that is going towards your core segment of Men over 50. So you’re really confident in putting your efforts towards them.
The whole marketing team is behind you on this – after all, once you “know” your core audience, the rest of the campaign follows its lead.
Next, you instruct your team to create ad campaigns on all the social channels and online publishers to maximize core audience reach.
And who do you show the ads to? How do you create your Audience(s) on these social platforms?
Naturally, the more accurate they are, means the more targeted and personalized you can be, resulting in better performance, ticket sales and ROI.
Your ad team can use basic interest targeting to cast a wide net of impressions across social media. This means they’ll just use Facebook’s algorithm to show ads to “Males” with an age floor and interests including “Jazz.”
Your team will want a second method of targeting this segment, so they’ll ask for a Custom Audience of past attendees in this segment.
This is data they can manipulate. And it works wonders for optimization.
Step 5: Find Lookalike Audiences
Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences (LLAs) are the gold standard in mining through cold traffic. The system scans the custom audience, reading the data from all users inside the file, and producing a near-perfect profile of the Ideal Audience.
All your team needs to do is upload an existing customer list to your ad managers, using it as the base-audience to generate a LLA.
You get to lean on the Facebook algorithm.
Now you’ve got the budget. The creative. The campaign. The audience. So it’s go-time.
Step 6: Launch
The campaign is launched. Time to gather the evidence, make a report, share the results….
Step 7: A/B Test
The creative team reviews your analytics and offers new copy to try, with an eye on optimizing towards the highest performers. You do this again each week until you’ve honed in on the most profitable message.
Step 8: Measure Results
But returns aren’t what you expected. Sales are suffering. And you’re not sure why.
Q: so what if everything you thought you knew… was wrong?
What if your fundamental understandings are miscalculated? What if 50s+ who like/are A, B, C aren’t actually the best audience for jazz night? What’s that mean for your six-figure/$125,000 ad spend? What’s that mean for future campaigns?
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