What does the consumer respond to?

We’re currently coming up with a marketing campaign to sell some sweet deals on websites. (Oh yea watch this space!). But one of the major questions that’s being asked is: What does the consumer relate to? What do they want?

Marketing is a dynamic thing, you want to relate to your audience, but you also want to stay in alignment with your values, goals and processes. Your campaigns need to encompass both your own and the viewers needs. For example as a creative agency, we want to do something out there, we think: whats the weirdest most memorable thing we can do to advertise our product? But often our answer is something that may not relate to our audience. We have to go with the happy medium, and we’ve used these basic rules to get us something that will work:

Emotions

You need to put something into your campaign that your user can relate too. You can choose to make it funny, eye opening, sad, happy, or shocking. When you speak to the customer through your campaign you should speak to them through the heart, make your customer feel something so that they make an instant connection. If they don’t buy now, they are more like to remember you when they are ready to buy.

Make it Relative

So maybe you do have a crazy out there idea, and don’t get me wrong sometimes they can be the best marketing campaigns. But when you use this idea in the end it needs to relate to the product. An example that I use is the Snickers ad – Betty White getting tackled at football. What the hell? But if you watch the whole thing and get the tag line ‘you are not you when your hungry’ and its basically saying are you hungry? Cant concentrate? You need a snickers.

Keep it engaging

You ever see people totally disengage with an ad, or click on a site and click off straight away? It’s probably because you haven’t given them something to stay there. Generally an opening eye catching image, a noise or bold statement will grab the viewers attention, and possibly make them want to read more.

Cater to all eyes

If you’re writing a blog, creating a flyer or creating a piece of informational media. Not everyone learns and engages in the same way. You need to relate to all different types of eyes and values. Here’s a few to consider:

  • Images for the visual user
  • Introductory text for the light reader
  • Getting into the details for the analytical person
  • Video footage for those who want the story told for them
  • Something interactive for the practical user – a quiz, or poll

Ask people, do a test

So you’ve got a few ideas and not sure which is best? Get your campaigns out there and ask people to respond. Do an A/B test to see which campaign has the most engagement, ask everyone you know to view your campaign or create a poll for users to rate. Use this information to determine which way will work best for you. Collecting data is an important part of marketing.