Adaptive Marketing for Christmas Campaigns

2020 seems to have flown by considering the circumstances, and we find ourselves heading towards the last few months of the year and of course Christmas! Marketing for the festive season this year will no doubt be as unusual as the months preceding it. For some businesses, the marketing budget could be tight this year, so how do you get the absolute best out of your campaigns?

What is Adaptive Marketing?

Adaptive Marketing is using the datasets you have to create marketing campaigns based around micro-messaging towards specific audiences and personality types. It allows a marketing campaign to make people feel like it’s connecting with them, impacting them in a way that changes something in their life.

Why Psychology Is So Important In Adaptive Marketing

So much of marketing is based on psychology. This is relevant to your messaging, branding, landing pages, content, social media presence, engagement with your audience and so much more. Everything in the marketing campaign leads to a goal, and it’s understanding the psychology of your audience that allows you to increase conversions and leads. But with adaptive marketing, it becomes even more important because you’re moving beyond the questions of what, when and how, and you’re now in the territory of WHY. Let’s look at some example questions:

• Why am I buying this product?
• Why do I need this product?
• Why is this product better than the alternatives?
• Why am I buying from this brand?
• Why is this product going to better my life?

Using the data you have on your audience, you likely already have the capabilities to answer these questions, but you’ve maybe never thought to go that deep into it because marketing using standard demographics works right? But what if it could work better, providing ROI figures even better than those you’re getting now.

Demographic vs Psychographic Profiles

A demographic profile is something you’ll be familiar with when working in marketing. Let’s look at an example:

• Male
• Aged 25-40
• In a relationship
• Income of £60k per year
• Music Lover

A psychographic profile goes deeper than your traditional demographic and could include things such as:

• Spends a lot of time at the office
• Commutes daily
• Spends most evenings online
• High disposable income
• Prefers quality over economy

You can see from the above lists that whilst the demographics allow you to define an audience, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can connect with them on a personal level.

Let’s imagine that I’m working on a campaign and we’re selling some high-end headphones, top the market price range of £399, very heavy on features and luxury. How could we connect these profiles together and create a campaign that connects with that audience? Here are some examples of how we can do that:

• Target The Commuting – “Cut the commuting noise with advanced active noise
  cancellation”
• Target The Office – “Rubbish Office DJ? Bring back your focus with Headphone X”
• Target The Quality – “Rated 5* by Y magazine, Headphone X brings premium sound and
  design at an incredible price”

Those are the things that connect the demographic to the psychographic profile and create an audience where you can create micro-messaging campaigns that are designed to show the person WHY the headphones are going to benefit them. Silence a noisy commute, focus in the office, style and luxury status.

Who aren’t you going to market these headphones too? Somebody who doesn’t have the disposable income to buy them, or prefers economy over quality despite being a high earner, because they’re not going to buy them.  They will however probably click the ad out of interest and now the marketing budget is being spent on driving traffic that won’t ever convert.

That’s a fairly simple example and you can go much deeper than it if you have the data to do so. But enough about headphones, what does this mean for your business?

How Can You Utilise This Over The Festive Season

The very first thing you need to do is take a step back and learn why your audience is buying your products beyond the standard demographics. How is your product or service impacting on your customer’s life? What need is your audience looking to fulfil when purchasing from you? Why are they buying your product at Christmas? Is it a gift? A treat for themselves? A gift for a partner? A friend? A parent? If your product is usually purchased by a certain audience, could it be a present? What audience would be buying your product as a gift?

Once you’ve nailed that down, it’s time to delve deeper into your audience psychographic profiles. Use the data you have to connect as many dots as possible and then apply some common sense. If your gut is saying no, your instincts are probably correct.

With some long-form content and a few months to work on getting it ranking, this method can work for SEO, but typically you will see better results from paid media such as PPC, Social Media, Display Networks, or in some cases, email marketing. The reason for this is that paid media, especially social media, allows you to target those audiences on a much more granular level so you can ensure that you’re pushing budget into the right places. You can also tweak the campaign fairly easily if you think it can be improved.

Even better though, would be a multi-channel approach to ensure that even with a refined audience, you can be there throughout the purchasing funnel at every stage.

It can be tricky, but also massively rewarding. The key to success with adaptive marketing is time resource and not necessarily huge budgets. Don’t have the time? Hire an expert! This isn’t a marketing campaign you can just throw money at, it requires high levels of planning, expertise and resource. But in return, you’ll get a better ROI even from smaller budgets.