The five rules for making marketing a positive experience

‘Accept cookies to receive personalised advertising on social media and other websites with relevant updates from us!’

That’s a typical message on a typical consent banner on a typical website. The proposition is clear: your data for relevant and personalised advertising. Since the implementation of the GDPR five years ago, users in Europe have grown familiar with this kind of agreement. But as a user, I would like to ask: What is in this for me?

It’s about time that we start asking this question: What are we actually providing our users in return for their data?

In partnership with YouGov, we conducted a survey to understand user perspectives. The survey asked respondents about their perception of exchanging data for personalised marketing, and the results revealed that younger individuals (18-29 years old) tended to see benefits, while users between 50 and 60 years old were more hesitant.

Yet are personalised experiences truly all that we can offer as marketers? I sat down with some of Precis’ brightest minds when it comes to creative, branding and experience and we came up with five recommendations to help advertisers build a positive experience for their users – irrespective of personalisation.

Rule number zero: Don’t build horrible ads

Ok, this might not be what you imagined, but I wanted to start this by stating the obvious: If you plan on advertising on social media or Programmatic, a basic standard of creative quality is important. Not only because it will take you further in your quality scores, but because it is a small effort we can make to show respect for the users who will engage with our brand out in the real world.

Remember that the adverts we publish don’t affect only your brand, but also the industry as a whole, ensuring that users have a positive perception of what we do is key to safeguarding the future of digital marketing. So if anything, put the minimum effort into your creatives, invest in different formats, bring your brand to whatever you are designing and, for the love of god, add some colour to it.

Rule number one: Use technology in your users’ favour

Ok, you got to our second tip, which means that your creatives will be minimally decent from now on. Good. You should know, however, that this alone is not enough.

While we often discuss the importance of making ads entertaining and attention-grabbing, building beautiful ads is not an end in itself: Incredible creatives might fall short if not paired with context and relevance. It might be a hard pill to swallow, but many advertisers are failing on using algorithms to their advantage to deliver true relevance.

Data-driven digital marketing might hold the promise of delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time, but on social media platforms, users often find themselves bombarded with ads for products they have already purchased or chased by clickbait ads that may have been relevant months before.

With this in mind, our first conclusion is that what algorithms think a positive marketing experience is, might not be completely aligned with users’ expectations and with what we believe true relevance to be. No matter how much automation social media platforms promise to employ for campaign optimisation, ultimately, it is your product and your creative strategy that will make the experience stand out and we have more choices than we might think.

• So what can you do? A couple of practical suggestions:
• Use platforms to their full potential, and invest in a variety of creatives and formats to engage with users in different contexts.
• If you are running social media, you should stay on top of new formats and updates because there are new possibilities launched almost every day.
• Optimise campaigns towards different objectives. Instead of running only conversion campaigns, make sure that you are building your audiences with video ads focused on awareness and also running consideration campaigns and bringing users to your website for exploration.
• Invest in enhancing conversion data to give the algorithms more quality input.

Rule number two: Use KPIs that reflect your users’ experiences

Digital marketing as it is today, was built at a time when advertisers had the data they needed when they needed it to justify all of their investments. In turn, we ended up with strategies that might not be adapted to the current reality of the fragmented digital landscape and KPIs that are not adapted to evaluate a positive user experience.

Let me be clear: With current privacy-oriented browser and app limitations, measuring upper funnel campaigns is ever more complicated. If our performance KPIs were already inadequate to measure brand activity in the past, now our attribution methods are even more fragmented.

→ Read our article about how upper-funnel users tend to opt out of consent banners more often than lower-funnel ones.
→ Read our article about the importance of first-party data to make up for fragile programmatic and social identifiers such as third-party cookies.

If we focus on metrics such as ROAS, CPA or Conversion Rates to evaluate all our activity, we will always overlook awareness and continue to optimise our strategy to the same audiences. We are essentially placing adverts to users who are already likely to consume our product anyway because that is what works best for the algorithms.

While marketing strategies are multi-layered and we do acknowledge that not every campaign can be an inspiring upper-funnel campaign, we need to question whether the digital marketing ecosystem, including platforms and advertisers, is hiding behind an illusion of relevance while subjecting users to high-frequency messaging and echo-chamber ad delivery.

In a way, a simple shift in paradigm might be the way to approach this: Make sure that you have a KPI framework that will allow you to measure your activity in a more comprehensive way.

We also have some practical suggestions on this point:

• Reporting on brand activity is no easy feat and it takes time and effort. An easy report you can look into is a share of brand dashboard using search data, it will show you the growing interest in your brand in time.
• You can also use brand trackers and brand lift studies to get a proper grasp of how your awareness activity is doing, but these will be time-consuming.

Rule number three: Think Lifetime Value

Another insight we wanted to share is that most strategies are only focused on short-term goals. Advertisers want to drive users to purchase but fail to think about how they can keep their users in the long run. In most cases, your high-value customers will be those that are loyal to your brand, so a mature strategy is to understand your product lifecycle to create opportunities to activate your high-value clientele, instead of bombarding the same users over and over again to drive single purchases.

This is an important insight because it brings us back to that first contract between brands and users: Ideally when a user agrees to share their data with us, we would honour it by building on top of this exchange and creating more opportunities for interaction in the future. Consent is an important currency and we have to make it count.

On this note, we should also mention that in the current web, cookie consent is only the first of the privacy agreements. You can read more about the growing importance of first-party data, but the truth is that companies have more stable data on their loyal customers.

An easy analogy is to think of consent as that first exchange you have with the cashier when you go to the supermarket, you talk about the weather and wish them a good evening. That’s fleeting, temporary. When users give you their email address and agree to hear from your brand in the future, that’s the equivalent of going to the same supermarket every week and knowing the name of the cashier’s dog.

Most advertisers lack a plan to consistently support their customers over time, which goes hand in hand with having a strong product strategy and compliant first-party data foundation. In order to achieve this, advertisers need to pair creative and first-party data strategies to make sure that algorithms work in their favour.

Rule number four: Understand your audience and your platform

Another mistake that advertisers make is to treat every platform the same way. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are not the same platforms, they afford different interactions and reach different audiences. When defining an activation strategy, the first decision that advertisers should make is where they want their brand to be and why. Then you need to consider who the audience in that platform is and how your strategy is supporting them in ways that will have a positive impact.

This logic is even more important when we consider platforms such as TikTok, for example. Recent research shows that TikTok is particularly prevalent among young people from minority groups in markets such as the US, so any advertiser wanting to activate TikTok in a responsible way should be thinking of how their product will genuinely support this audience and how to tailor their messages to empower the users.

Rule number five: Think about meaning in addition to representation

Representation has been a hot topic for a long time now and also one that might cause both friction and fatigue. But we think that it continues to be crucial if we want everyone to have a meaningful and positive experience with our ads. You should probably start with the bare minimum: Make sure that your ads are respectful and culturally sensitive, but don’t stop there.

Users go to social media to be entertained and inspired, as advertisers, when we place an ad in front of them, we are taking a little bit of their time. So it’s important that we do it responsibly.

We are responsible for the impact we have on our audience, if our users feel depleted, that’s on us. If they feel frustrated, that’s on us. If they feel empowered, that’s also on us. Be responsible and accountable. That’s the first recommendation we have for advertisers who want to get creative right from an inclusivity standpoint.

When thinking about how to include underrepresented groups in your creatives, you have to go beyond the bare minimum. And if you understand exactly what your audience struggles with and needs, you will see opportunities to engage with it in a positive way.Consider how your product will actively benefit those communities, and how it will help them in their struggles and support them. Make sure that you reflect on what their specific needs and demands are so that you build an empowering strategy. Do not base your creative strategy on stereotypes and assumptions about your audience.

All of these recommendations will ensure that your message is authentic and genuine, which is a really important part of providing users with a positive marketing experience.

Conclusion

These were our five recommendations for advertisers who are looking to go beyond and build meaningful connections with their users. We hope you feel inspired to apply them to your own campaigns.

Don’t let your strategy be swayed by technology and use it in your favour, make sure that the positive user experience is reflected in your choice of KPIs, consider your users beyond conversion, understand your audience and make sure that you are genuine when you engage with diverse audiences.

If we are asking users to share their data with us, we need to stand up to our side of this agreement, and making marketing a positive experience is definitely a part of that, so we hope this guide helps ignite the conversation.