Want stronger content? 7 steps to truly understanding your audience

Your audience are more than just consumers of your products. From Marketing Land:

“The trouble I see, as a content marketer, is that we too often look at a reader through the narrow prism of how they interact with our product or brand. That approach is a trap that leads to building content that’s brand-driven, rather than reader-centric.”

Level Insight:

• With all the data sources available to marketers today, failure to analyze represents a lost opportunity. However, any conclusions drawn from machine-collected data about a living, breathing audience must be challenged with the vigor of a skeptical scientific examination. Correlation does not equal causation and marketers must try to disprove every relationship between data points prior to reaching a conclusion about a complex population.
• At Level, we utilize disparate data sources from numerous platforms, including Google Analytics and Facebook, to understand your audience outside of their relationship to your brand. By analyzing other areas of interest, we formulate communication strategies that encompass other characteristics to convey a deeper understanding of who they are and what they value. It also enables us to understand how your products and services can best fill a need in their lives. Understanding the audience as a defined subset of unique humans lets us expand the audience for our digital campaigns by targeting people with similar characteristics.

How Using Brand Ads In Unexpected Ways Drove Higher Installs for Lyft

Can creative concepts be effective and multipurpose? From Think With Google:

“Good creative will never go out of style, the trick now is to find ways to take your best creative and test and apply it to more formats.”

Level Insight:

• The brand persona may sometimes be enough to drive a sale for lower-barrier purchases. This study indicates that the mere feeling of liking a brand is enough to drive a desired action. Brand ads became synonymous with direct-response.
• Compelling video assets that may not have been created for the express purpose of lead generation may be worth testing in YouTube. This study suggests that quality content is valuable for customer generation regardless of its original intention, and incremental spend in YouTube could be an opportunity to reach new customers throughout the funnel.
• One caveat when discussing this study of Lyft brand ads is that a download of a free app is an impulse decision. An engaging ad with Shaquille O’Neal that effectively communicates the benefits of using a ridesharing service is enough to drive a couple taps on a mobile device to download the free app. However, this one-step approach to purchase evaluation is not appropriate to high-value B2B purchases that require a multi-tiered approach to decision making. At minimum, it would require a series Shaq videos.