Good visual content isn’t the only key to success when it comes to successful digital marketing campaigns. A study by Olsen & Pracejus in 2020 found that as ad customization increased, so did the consumers relationship and engagement with the brand. The best brands utilize visual content which is tailored to their chosen platforms and target audience. Providing consumers with differing experiences when engaging with a brand online can be the difference between a sale, lead or conversion. To tailor your content correctly a content plan must be put in place to understand your audience.

Who Is Your Audience?

It’s sometimes assumed that a brand knows exactly who its audience is. This assumption doesn’t always translate when posting online. Before any content is served its recommended that all brands have a Consumer Persona. A Consumer Persona is an in-depth profile of your target customer. They are used by marketers to target the people they want to reach. Follow the below steps to create an in-depth persona.

Evaluate Your Audience:

Researching your current audience is the most important step in creating a consumer persona. You can find out more about your audience through the various insights and analytics pages available on each social media platform as well as on Google Analytics which provides an in-depth overview on all traffic on your website. Investigating your audience allows you to greater understand attributes such as:

• when your target audience is most active online
• what age and gender they are
• where they are located
• what devices they are using
• What type of online content they engage with (Affinity categories)

Competitor Research

Analysing your competitors is crucial in understanding where you stand in the marketplace.

• Who are your competitors targeting?
• How are they reaching their target audience? (Platforms, Media, Messaging, Aesthetic etc)
• How are they performing? (Track engagements per post and Engagements by Content Type
• What are they doing that you aren’t? and vice versa?

Once you have researched your competitors you can compare them with yourself. Measure your success with theirs and look for clues to understand what they do differently to you. The more you know about why a competitor is successful in targeting their audience, the better you can tailor content to yours. Now you know exactly who your target audience is, begin tailoring content towards them. There are many ways to go about creating content that is tailored, here are some best practices:
 

Tailor By Audience:

Understanding specific details such as age, gender, location, and interests will help determine what kind of content you provide. Use your data to create content that is relevant to the location you’re targeting and culturally relevant to their gender, age group and interests. For example, if you’re aiming to reach young people in Ireland who love tennis, you’ll know to create visually engaging content with tennis related visuals that should be posted in June and July to aligns with Wimbledon.

Tailor content by platform:

If you are posting content across multiple platforms make sure that the content being posted is accessible and engaging on all your chosen social media accounts. Often brands will repurpose content across all social media platforms. A good content plan will dictate that a creative video that does well on Instagram might not do as well on LinkedIn in the same way an informative post that captivated attention on Twitter may not garner the same engagement if posted on TikTok.
This is not to say that content should not be repurposed, in fact repurposing content is very useful. However, it is only effective if you consider how the content is repurposed. For example, consider shortening copy and word counts for image heavy sites like Instagram or conveying the same data from a blog post more efficiently with an infographic on LinkedIn. Remember it’s not a one size fits all policy online, so simply resizing one piece of content across all platforms won’t work as well as tailoring the same content to the platform.

Tailor ads by position in sales funnel:

Today advertisers have the option to create tailored ads to retarget consumers depending on their location in the sales funnel via the use of pixels. A marketing pixel is a small piece of HTML code inserted into the header of a website which track what users do on your site. These pixels can tell you how many people viewed a product, added it to cart, initiated checkout or completed a purchase. You can then use these pixels to create audiences based on these positions.
Audiences can then be served highly tailored content designed specifically designed for them dependent on what stage of the sales funnel they are currently in. An example of this would be retargeting cart abandoners with a message that reads. “We caught you looking! Complete your purchase today”. This type of tailored messaging typically delivers higher than average ROI. According to Google research has found that integrated campaigns with customized creatives can lead to a 67% increase in brand ROI over campaigns that don’t bother to adapt for different channels

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