The importance of creating audience-specific content to improve brand resonance, interaction, and conversion
Introduction
At its core, advertising is created in order to connect with and convince potential customers to commit to a product or service. Whether it’s a newsletter, movie ticket, sousaphone, or high-end sports car, advertising ultimately tries to persuade users to hand over their time, attention, and money. A big, splashy, expensive ad might be one way to draw customers to your product, but that isn’t viable for 99% of companies. An effective ad, one that resonates strongly with audiences, is a much more efficient and sustainable way to increase interest in your product. “Resonance” is a bit abstract, but it is essentially the aspects of your product and advertising that are drawing positive attention from your potential customers. Understanding what aspects of your messaging and product are the most resonant with audiences is a major benefit toward honing in on the proper message needed to fully connect with customers.
Awareness and Consideration are the two segments of the standard customer conversion path where social and video platforms are best utilized. Awareness informs people about the existence and benefits of the product, while Consideration invites users to weigh in on their opinion of the product itself. While designing ads that aim at a particular point in the path can improve efficiency, improvements within each point can go even further in persuading your audience. For instance, Awareness mostly relies on the fit of the product and its relevance for those targeted: serving an ad for baby back ribs to a lifelong vegan will not do well no matter how polished the content.
However, the Consideration portion of the path is the most affected by the content of the ad itself. Consideration is driven by messaging and resonance: the more effective the ad, the higher the amount of interaction. This effect is seen both in action (clicks, comments, likes, etc.) and consumption (views). The stronger the resonance of the content, the more likely they are to continue through the conversion path, leading to better business outcomes.
TONIK+ Video Intelligence (TVI) has the ability to determine not only which parts of your content are the most-resonant at a broad level, but also what is working best for specific audiences. These audience-by-audience differences in performance can be addressed through the creation of remixed content that is specific to those audiences, improving resonance, interaction, and conversion. Through the use of audience-specific testing, we can identify the best messaging going forward for each audience, boosting performance and driving even more users toward your end goals.
Audience:Overall::Sample:Population
At TONIK+, our typical initial analysis for a client focuses on a piece of content they’ve released that has garnered a significant number of views. From this content, we’re able to identify what specific scenes, themes, and topics are resonating with each audience, then create remixed content that dramatically outperforms the original, untailored videos. I’ve gone in-depth about the process and the concept in previous articles, which can be found here and here. These broad analyses are great for Awareness content, as it allows us to see what’s working well for a large cross-section of the general population. This analysis works quite well for a broad scope strategy: if your goal is to reach as many people as possible regardless of the audience, a broad analysis will improve the messaging for the broad populace.
However, the results and insights obtained from an overall population might not be indicative of samples within the population. A broad audience might like a certain scene, but if you want to focus on particular segments that are more likely to convert on your product, you’re going to want to make sure the aspects and scenes that they prefer aren’t being lost in the noise of a much larger, much less receptive amalgamation of users. Isolating out performance for defined audiences will allow for messaging tailored specifically for that audience.
How exactly does this work? Typically, retention results for a video are unsegmented; all audiences are combined together in the results with no ability to separate them out. However, clients can use a paid campaign with defined audiences in such a way that each audience records its retention data separately. This provides TONIK+ with data for each audience, at which point we can run analysis on each set of data in order to obtain audience-specific TVI scoring for the same piece of content across any number of target groups.
For example, let’s say that a trailer has nine scenes that greatly outperform the rest of the video for its organic deployment. We’ll call them Scenes A-I, with Scene A being the best scene and Scene I being the ninth-best. This deployment was supplemented with an additional campaign for five audiences to obtain audience-specific performance. The breakdown was as follows:
Organic: A B C D E F G H I
Audience 1: A C D B E G H F I
Audience 2: C D A B F E G H I
Audience 3: A D C G B E F H *
Audience 4: A G D E C H F B I
Audience 5: E A C D B F H G I
* Corresponds to a scene outside the original top nine
While some scenes are mostly the same across all audiences (I is consistently at the bottom or worse, A is consistently at or near the top), the order is completely different for each audience. This provides a unique “fingerprint” for each audience and their preferences. TONIK+ insights can identify the underlying drivers to why each audience is in this specific order and can craft remixed content specific to each audience to capitalize on what they like. For instance, a remix for Audience 1 might consist of Scenes A-D-C-G, while a remix for Audience 5 might have Scenes A-D-C-E. These spots are mostly similar, but the payoff is different and caters to the strength of that audience. These spots can then be run in future paid campaigns in order to more-efficiently drive users to learn more about the film or even purchase tickets as the opening weekend approaches.
Audience Testing = Improved Performance
We recently worked with a movie studio for the launch of their latest film. We set up and ran a test across six audiences for their second trailer in order to determine audience-by-audience performance. Armed with the results we obtained, we used TVI to produce remixed :10 spots for both Instagram and Snapchat. These TONIK+ remixes were run against a baseline established by non-TONIK+ content in order to determine the benefit (if any) to the audience-specific remixes.
TONIK+ creative boasts superior Swipes/Clicks and Video Completion Rate relative to the baseline, with the remixed creative on Instagram outperforming the non-TONIK+ baseline by 23% in VCR and by 17% in Clicks. Snapchat was even stronger, with a 30% improvement on VCR and a 43% boost to Swipes. Some audiences fared even better: SciFi Fans saw a 57% increase in Swipes and a 24% increase in Clicks on Snapchat and Instagram, respectively, and Gamers saw a 44% increase in Swipes and a 23% increase in Clicks.
Audience-specific remixing works well across all KPIs by distilling content into its top-performing units. Users will view videos that are much more aligned with their specific interests, leading to longer views, more clicks, and increased conversion rates. That ultimately means better results for our clients and a better relationship with their customers, no matter what their goals are.
Conclusion
Through the use of audience testing and TVI, TONIK+ is able to craft audience-specific remixed content for use in paid ad strategies across multiple platforms. This remixed content delivers increased performance on any number of KPIs through the consolidation of the best portions of your content as determined by your specific audiences. This strategy can deliver better performance than analysis of all viewers as it allows for a dialed-in focus on key audiences that might not align perfectly with the feedback from the masses. Providing custom content for an audience engenders even more connection with your customers than ever before, and gets you one step closer to having a sure-fire answer to unlocking the potential of your advertising.
