Looking for ways to create a perfect ad? You know it isn’t rocket science. But, boy, it does sometimes feel like it.
To get the best ROI possible from your ad, you need to refine your audience persona so that it’s highly targeted. As a result, it will be displayed in front of the right people. This will increase engagement and conversions - and it will ensure you don’t keep wasting your budget.
The big questions are: How do you create the best target audience personas, and how do you use these personas to create the perfect ad?
Although we don’t live in a perfect world, creating the perfect ad is a doable task. In this article, we take a look at how to create a target audience persona and use it to your advantage. But first …
The Benefits of Creating Target Audience Personas
When you create a target audience persona, everything improves. You create:
More relevancy - You can customize your ads so that you target specific customers. The more target audience personas you have, the more you can tailor specific ads to each one.
More CTR - By showing the right ads to the right people, you’re improving your click-through rate. In fact, you can increase clicks by as much as 96%.
More engagement - Your ads will be shared by more people, which leads to even more engagement.
More ROI - Ultimately, by creating targeting personas you’re saving money by ensuring your ads are displayed in front of the right people.
Let’s take a look at how to create your target audience persona:
Outline Your Ideal Customer
You can use your analytics to take a closer look at who typically buys from you. Then, you can draw a basic outline of your ideal customer.
There are a few questions you’ll need to answer:
Is my ideal customer male or female?
How old is my customer?
Do they have a family? Are they married?
Where do they live?
What do they do for a living?
What are their hobbies and passions?
Here’s an example of an ideal customer: Sarah is a typical female, aged between 30 and 38. She has 2 young kids and works in Human Resources.
Once you’ve sketched in these details, it’s time to …
Uncover Deeper Insights About Your Ideal Customer
Okay, so we know that Sarah is a woman aged between 30 and 38, and that she’s our ideal customer. But we need to get more granular if we’re to create a truly targeted persona that we can then use to create the perfect ad.
So, we start to ask deeper questions, like these:
What are Sarah’s biggest pain points?
What challenges does Sarah face?
The questions need to relate to your product or service. For example, if I was providing a service that helps businesses develop educational materials, I’d need to look at the pain points faced by key players at organizations who are struggling to create these materials. It might be that Sarah is being blockaded by upper management who are taking their time to approve her goals.
For that purposes, you can use the Customer Data Platform that allocates users data from all possible sources and creates persistent & unified user profiles.
A great way to uncover deeper insights about your ideal customer is to engage them in real time. Drift is an awesome app that lets you talk to people as they browse your website. The more you talk to your customers, the more you’ll be able to understand them.
You could try being more direct, too. For example, you could chat with your customers on the phone in order to learn more about them, including what they like and what they don’t like about your brand and products.
Don’t forget the power of a customer survey as well.
Find Out How Your Ideal Customer Consumes Content
Learning how your target persona consumes content will go a long way to ensuring you create the perfect ad. It matters whether your target persona engages more on their desktop computer or on their mobile device, for example, because they behave differently. Mobile users are generally on the hunt for specific information, they’re in a hurry, and they’re pretty much ready to buy. All of this should feed into your target audience persona, and how you shape your ads.
It also matters when they consume their content. You need to figure out if your ideal customer consumes most of their content at work or at home, and you also need to find out which social networks they use.
Take a look at your customers’ historical behavioral data, too, in order to find out which content your customers have found the most valuable and useful. What were your most popular pages? What led to the most conversions? Armed with this info, you can create ads that increase conversions even more.
Using the Acquisitions tab on Google Analytics, you can also learn which social media platforms the majority of your customers come from.
It’s a good idea to find someone who represents your target persona super well, before checking out their social media profile(s) to see what they share and interact with. Twitter is useful for this, and it should also give you an insight into the kind of people they see as influencers. This is all knowledge you can use to your advantage when creating your ads.
It’s all about going beyond mere demographics to uncover data that allows you to craft ads that connect with people on a deeper, more emotional level.
Refine Your Target Audience Persona Over Time
The beauty of targeted ads is that you can keep making tweaks until you discover the absolute successful formula that ensures you create a perfect ad each time. The key is to keep improving your insights as you go along.
To do this, start with your ideal customer, as outlined above. For example, in Facebook, this is known as a Lookalike Audience. To create your lookalike audience, open up your ads manager and click “Audience.”
Then, pick “create a custom audience,” before selecting “customer file.”
Next, add a file of customers (it could be an Excel file), before picking a country and desired audience size. Then, click “Create Audience.”
After your first campaign is over, you can tweak your target strategy by experimenting with target location, interests and demographics. You can also make your audience narrower by selecting required interests - for example, Sarah should be interested in this and that, and should like this and that.
Facebook allows you to experiment with behaviors, too.
Also, Demand Side Platform has the same possibility.
The trick is to add more specifics each time you run an ad until you get a highly refined and super converting audience each time.
Once you’ve got your audience, it’s time to create the perfect ad. Here are the steps you need to take:
1.Craft a Compelling Headline
Your headline is your first chance to grab your customers’ attention. Because research has shown that 59% of consumers share articles after having read just the headline, it’s really important that you don’t waste this opportunity.
When crafting your headline, remember your target audience persona. Who are you aiming your ad at? What would grab their attention?
Before writing your headline, delve into your data once more so that you understand exactly what your audience persona will be attracted to.
Here’s an excellent resource of the best 100 headlines ever written.
2. Create Tension With Your Image
If you know anything about audiences, it’s that they don’t want you to be boring with your images.
What’s boring? It’s when you pair up a literal copy with a literal image.
For example, imagine my headline is along the lines of “Make money in your sleep.” If my image was literal, it would be a stock image of someone literally making money in their sleep.
However, the trick is to tap into the emotions of your target persona by using playful images to create tension with your literal copy.
Take a look at how Slack did this below. Their copy is literal - “What it feels like to get 48% less email” - but their image is abstract. Without the copy, the image would make no sense. Side by side with the copy, however, the image bursts with character and tension. It’s brought to life, and it speaks to the target audience persona.
3. Remove Customer Objections Before Nailing Your CTA
Now that you have your target audience persona, you should know what some of your customer objections might be.
For example, if I’m using my ad to ask my prospects to download a report, their objection might be “But I don’t want to commit to anything.” To remove doubt and friction from my call to action, I can answer their objection in my description area. Take a look at how The Dollar Shave Club did this below.
By adding ‘No commitment. No fees. No BS,’ the brand is easing the tension before hitting the prospect with the CTA. It’s little things like this that help you create the perfect ad.
When it comes to your actual CTA, meanwhile, it’s really important that you speak to your target audience persona in a clear and direct way. Be clear about what it is you want them to do, and use trigger words like “buy”, “download” or “shop” for maximum clarity.
And now that you know your target audience persona and what their biggest needs and wants are, you can use words that push their emotional buttons. For example, “plan your dream vacation today!” is the kind of CTA that will excite a very particular audience persona.
When crafting your CTA, refer back to your target audience persona in terms of what devices they use the most. Mobile users behave differently than desktop users. If your target audience persona is largely made up of mobile users, you’ll need to tweak your CTA so that it’s primed for people who are ready to buy.
Conclusion
As long as you understand your target persona, your ad game should vastly improve. Nail your target audience persona, experiment with your ads, monitor and test your ad results and keep tweaking until you get the conversions you want. Then, it’s time to scale by increasing your budget.
