Designing for the user
Knowing your audience. There may be no more important marketing principle today. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how fancy your website or how pretty your ad is if the message doesn’t connect with your target.
This applies to everything from packaging to websites, to mobile apps, to print ads, and any other piece of marketing collateral or communication you can think of. Putting your user first means designing, creating, crafting, writing, and messaging according to what the target or end user wants to see, hear, and experience. For a top ad agency, “hitting the mark” is all about aligning the client’s goals with the customer’s needs. It’s like matchmaking, only without the first date kiss goodnight.
Getting to the heart of the issue
One of the most common challenges to overcome in marketing today is helping clients to understand that consumers don’t often respond to the hard-sell, product forward strategy like they may have in the past. Consumers are increasingly finicky about what they want and are harder to motivate and inspire. People have increasingly shown that they don’t want to be hit over the head; they need to be compelled by what they’re seeing and hearing in another way.
This is particularly true if you’re targeting millennials. Old-school tactics may not work on a new-school audience. “In order to feel invested, they need to believe in your product and the message behind it,” said HubSpot in a blog post about why “traditional marketing tactics don’t work on millennials.”
And they’re not the only ones. Red Racer Advertising has found that, across multiple demographics, product types, and industries, people will respond to strategies that have been cultivated to connect with them. This is because the messaging has been identified as what they want to see and hear, and how and when they want to see and hear it. The “HIT THEM WITH THE PRODUCT” tactic can backfire pretty harshly if you don’t first learn how your audience wants to receive information. Most people don’t want to hear, “BUY, BUY, BUY!” all day long, unless they’re at the Stock Exchange. Or an *NSYNC reunion concert.
Who are you talking to?
As a top Dallas marketing agency, Red Racer’s goal is always to make those important connections between clients and customers. We may employ slightly different tactics depending on the individual client and marketing campaign, but the underlying strategy is always the same: Let the data tell the story.
Data informs our understanding of what the audience wants to see and hear because we can view, in hard numbers, what they respond to—today, tomorrow, and next week and month. Having constant access to relevant data allows us to continually revisit the analytics, recommend tweaks where needed, and revise concepts as user data evolves and gives us further insight into the habits of our clients’ targets.
A successful marketing piece has to take the client’s goal to heart and then find the most successful way to communicate with the user. Sometimes, the client has an idea we can use as a jumping off point; sometimes, we speak up and suggest another way. At Red Racer, we wholeheartedly feel that’s our responsibility as marketing professionals. It could be that a client in the exercise supplement field wants to concentrate on the pricing of their product when the data has shown us that buyers simply aren’t concerned about this. Perhaps a client in the health and wellness field wants to talk about a revolutionary new procedure they are doing, but the very clinical language needs to simplified to be digestible to a non-medical crowd. Finding the right “tone” for any marketing piece is all about knowing your audience and having the trust of your client; both are equally important.
Figuring it all out
All the creative thinking, wordsmithing, and design excellence in the world won’t help overcome incorrect and incomplete messaging, be it traditional or digital, and most agencies will tell you they don’t enjoy having to start over because the initial intel wasn’t good. Part of Red Racer’s successful marketing campaign process involves field trips that are geared toward learning about the users, from the users. We know that, many times, we are not the intended audience any more than the client is. So we take ourselves out of the equation and set about figuring out precisely who is.
With that knowledge, we can help guide our clients toward marketing initiatives that work with designs and messaging that gets seen and heard—the right way.
