Your target audience's preferences are changing. How will you adapt your ad strategy to stay ahead?

When your target audience's preferences shift, it's crucial to stay agile. Start by diving into new data to understand the changes—look at recent trends, feedback, and behavior patterns. Then, adjust your ad strategy by experimenting with different messaging, platforms, or formats. For instance, if your audience is leaning towards video content, focus on creating engaging short videos. Always test and refine your approach, and be ready to pivot as new insights emerge. Staying ahead means being responsive and adaptable.

How you segment your audience and target them depends on the targeting capabilities of the ad-platform you're using. Some platforms allow you to get as granular as targeting job titles while others, are a bit more generalized. The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to reach them using different platforms. You should also consider the various targeting approaches you can take within a platform to reach your specific segment and gauge the effectiveness of each approach. For example, if you are targeting nurses you could target by education, job title, company, members of groups or some combination pending on the platform.

Use advanced segmentation to help you pick the segment types and their combinations to create the audiences. Attribution of the events to customer profiles as captured by marketing analytics in real-time. This is one of the best techniques to identify the newer segments and activate them in the right channels. Creating targeted ads to those focused segments in those preferred choice of engagement channels will yield best results (POAS Profit on advertising spend) & ROAS.

Try to go to market with multiple types of creative to test as much as you can and see what resonates with your audience. Think of how your ad sits within the context of the environment it's posted on. Do the colours stand out? Is it easy to read? Is the copy relevant? Does your audience respond more to emotional messaging or rational messaging? When you are looking at the data, also try to take qualitative considerations into account to fill in the gaps of why a creative may be performing well. Continue to iterate and test out your hypothesis. Running ads is an ongoing experiment.

Tailor your messaging to align with the current interests and values of your audience, ensuring it resonates on a personal level. Implement dynamic ad content that can adapt in real-time based on user interactions, delivering the most relevant message at the right moment. For instance, during my experience as a sales intern in the insurance industry during the COVID-19 situation, we shifted our focus to emphasize health and life insurance benefits, addressing the heightened concerns of our audience. This approach not only increased engagement but also built trust by directly addressing their immediate needs. By continuously refining your messaging, you can maintain relevancy and strengthen your connection with the audience.