Beach, BBQs And Baseball: What Marketers Need To Know This Summer
By Oz Etzioni, Clinch
The summer months are busy — from exciting adrenaline-pumping adventures to relaxing exotic beach vacations. This means that consumers are less involved on their social media feeds, spending more time out and about. So as a marketer, how do you win consumer attention when there is so little to go around?
In order to beat the heat and beat their numbers, retail marketers need to clearly define their goals and commit to being heard in the summer months. Here are some ways they can break through the clutter:
Relevancy Rules: Consumers can tell if an ad is not relevant to them almost immediately. Leverage data to personalize, target and gain interest. Prevent the consumer from scrolling on by personalizing the ad based on their preferences and interests. Only show the product(s) they are interested in, the best offer that will entice them, deals based on location and maybe even the current weather and time of day.
More Channels Mean More Opportunity: Marketers should be able to deliver ad experiences on any channel, platform and device in which their target consumers are. Ads — personalized or not — won’t have the desired effect if consumers are only seeing them on one channel. In the summer, the focus should be on reaching your consumers on their mobile devices, leveraging social video (especially Instagram Stories), YouTube and Over-the-Top (OTT). In short, be where your consumers are.
Don’t Overproduce, Especially With Instagram Stories: Instagram Stories blend in with user-generated content. If your spot is overly stylized and produced, it will stick out in all the wrong ways, seem as if it was an interruption, and get skipped! Success can no longer be predicted by the money spent on an ad. Success on mobile is about smart spending on scalable, cross-channel creative that delivers the right message at the right time, the right way.
Audio Matters: Viewers are watching mobile video with the sound on more than one would think, particularly Instagram stories. Ads should be prepared to catch consumers by the “eyes” and “ears.” Make sure the audio, whether a voice-over narrative or just music, relates to the story you’re trying to tell. Don’t use the audio element to grab attention — that can only backfire on the whole experience you’re trying to deliver.
Speed And Scale: Stay relevant to the moment, location, interests and other “dynamic” parameters that define the success of media. Companies now all have the ability to create and target ads that scale cross-device and cross-channel, reducing repetition and enhancing consumer experience throughout the entire funnel. Be able to do it at scale and serve it anywhere the target consumers are.
Summer marketing, while challenging, is an opportunity to develop stronger customer relationships. Retail marketers will benefit from taking advantage of the warm weather, sunny attitude and creativity that the season brings.
Oz Etzioni is CEO and Co-Founder of Clinch. Etzioni founded Clinch to take advantage of the explosive growth in programmatic and address the need for data-driven creative personalization . Etzioni previously helped to form and lead the user experience and innovation department at MRM, part of McCann World Group in NYC.