Relevance is key to success. Being relevant means reaching your audience at the right time, in the right place, and most importantly with the right Admessage. To do this, we need to understand mindset at any given stage of the customer journey.
The influencers of mindset at our control are time, location and context.
- Time
Time can have a massive influence on consumer mindset, are they at home, at work, on the commute, or on their way to meet friends. This will affect whether they’re picking up their phone to research, entertain, inform, or shop. Advertisers should reflect this by creating messages relevant to the prevailing mindset. For example, they’re more likely research larger purchases such as furniture, cars and holidays in the evening when they have more time.
Conversely, Admessages promoting impulse purchases such as lunch meal deals are more effective delivered during the morning when people are sat at their desks. Admessages at this time should be brief, and feature a strong call to action, reflecting the fact consumers are time scarce in these environments.
If you want to learn more about modern consumer journeys Patrick Singer from Google’s academy offers some great insights.
- Location
Location should be considered when planning your strategy. In fact, time and location are inextricably linked. Time often determines where people are due to their regular travel patterns such as commuting to work, the school run, shopping etc.
However, location can be used more generally. People will travel further for high value purchases, so advertisers should target a larger radius from their business. The opposite is true for low value and impulse purchases. So, location can help us minimise wastage by not showing our message beyond the distance a consumer will travel to store.
- Context
By making sure your message is relevant to the content it’s shown with can dramatically improve its effectiveness. People will perceive your message to be more relevant if it reflects the subject their engaged with.
Admessenger Intelligence is a great way of achieving this. Our platform “crawls” page content using keywords to identify content. For example, say you want to advertise your electric car brand. Our tech identifies content containing the keywords “Electric car” and serves your Admessage. This ensures maximum relevance increasing engagement with your message.
- What makes a good Admessage?
You can do all of the above, but if your Admessage isn’t compelling your campaign can fail to reach its goals.
- Short messages work best. Remember people have a short attention span on mobile. Make sure your offer appears early in the message to hook the audience.
- Standout. Use custom options such colour, bold, underline and italics to make your Admessage pop off the page.
- Call to action – Give people an imperative to click your message with phrases like: Click for more, Learn more, or Click now. However, a strong offer such as discounts, or a limited period can create urgency.
- Avoid Large Logos! So often we see Admessages with logos that are way too big. These limit the space the copy has rendering the Admessage non-sensical.
- Path to Purchase
Finally, consider your customer’s path to purchase. A great way of doing this is to put yourself in their shoes. The way you react to advertising will be a very good measure of how your Admessage will be seen. Think of the number of times you need to see an ad before you’ll remember it, or act on it. Also think about your campaign goals. If you want someone to travel to your shop, show them how to get there, and give them a reason such as an event, or an offer that can only be redeemed in store. If you’re trying to encourage them to learn more about your product encourage with an interesting message, or useful tip relevant to your product.
On the other hand, if you want them to buy online think about how well they know you. Do they know enough about your business to buy from you online? If you haven’t done a great deal of marketing up to this point you may be better concentrating on brand awareness to build familiarity and trust. This will help convert customers in the future.
If you’re confident a customer will buy from you online make sure that when they click on your ad it takes them through to the specific offer. Consumers hate landing on generic home pages, and this in turn leads to higher bounce rates.
The other big no no is to avoid lengthy form fills. A clunky check out process, or enquiry form will lead to dropped baskets and low conversions, particularly on mobile. You should also bear in the mind that the path to purchase may involve multiple touch points and devices. A consumer may see your Admessage on their mobile creating the initial interest but prefer to return via their laptop to make the purchase.
It’s important that your analytics are setup to reflect this complicated, non-linear route to purchase. Failing to do so can mean you end up placing too much emphasis on activity that drives last-click action. This will be to the detriment of your long term sales as fewer new customers are introduced to your brand.
Follow the tips above and you’re far more likely to deliver a successful Admessage campaign. Remember getting your message seen in the right context is crucial. Also, don’t overlook creative. Short messages with a strong call to action will always work better. But don’t stop there, think about where your potential customer goes next. Make the post click experience simple and relevant. Finally think about the path your consumer takes to purchase and make sure you’re attributing all the parts of the process correctly.
