In the battle for your wallet, relevance always beats authenticity
Many years ago I was participating in a marketing conference in New York. A friend of mine in the panel was ragging on and on about authenticity. At some point, I asked him “do you think Vanity Fair bras are authentic?” Yes. “Victoria’s Secret?” Yes. “Maidenform?” Yes. “La Perla?” Yes. “OK… which one do YOU use?” 450 people laughing drove home a point: it doesn’t matter how authentic something is, if it isn’t relevant, you’re not buying it.
Not to say authenticity doesn’t belong in the equation. But it comes after relevance.
So, how do you add relevance to your messaging to improve your conversions? Hint… it does not involve your opinion at all.
- Understand the complexity of your customers. Unless you have a very simplistic product, your product or brand covers a wide range of situations. Even something as simple as “Mac & Cheese” will appeal to many different groups: some people will buy M&C because it is a cheap but filling food; others will want the comfort-food aspect; still others will want the ease of preparations.
- Survey your customers. Create a survey that will capture product usage, attitudes (to find out the most relevant factors to communicate) and enough behavioral and demographic factors to be able to identify your segments. Publish it on your social media pages, give respondents a good incentive.
- Once you have the segment + relevancy side of the equation clear, use dynamic creative optimization and random landing pages to test a bunch of creative at once.
- Concurrently, use data-driven buying (e.g., programmatic) to deliver the creative to the right segment. There are many data driven alternatives, from programmatic to CTV that you can consider
- Obviously, analyze the entire mass of data to find what performs better.
Think about the rewards. Let’s say that you spend some more time planning and are able to just distinguish among your 3 different groups and increase the conversion even a bit and your sales and ROI can increase substantially.
Ages ago, I abandoned the idea of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and embraced the notion that there are things that are complex. This always reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Kill Bill I when Uma Thurman after killing half a dozen adversaries suddenly hears the Crazy 88 arriving.
