Co-Founder of Loyal Pandas, overseeing client’s success.
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How does your e-commerce brand drive the most profitability out of your ads? The single most important answer: knowing exactly what your target market’s desire is.
However, most brands that acquire this information are still in the golden age of the late ’90s and early 2000s, marketing through one-way communication.
One-Way Communication
Before the internet, a plethora of marketing channels — TV, mail, PR stunts and billboards — allowed brands to reach their customers. However, the customer could never reciprocate the brand’s message. In practical terms, recording devices weren’t attached to TVs to listen or watch consumers’ responses and outcries during a commercial (a Big Brother level of creepy).
I remember being a young kid in that era sitting on the living room floor, eating my Frosted Flakes, exhausted from school and patiently waiting for SpongeBob to come back on my parents’ box TV.
The TV would flash to the next commercial, and the Super Soaker brand featured one of their new water guns. As much as I remember wanting one of their water guns and talking into the TV, “Coooool,” Super Soaker never heard or saw my reactions to one of their advertisements. They couldn’t see me drop my spoon into my milk and my jaw wide open. I was only hearing and seeing them — hence, TV commercials being a classic example of a one-way communication system.
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The biggest problem brands continue to struggle with today is that they aren’t listening to their consumers, similarly to how Super Soaker could not. But these brands aren’t advertising in Super Soaker’s golden age. So, if you’re working for a brand or running one, then listen up: You’re advertising in the reign of social media, the age where technology grants you the ability to market with two-way communication.
Back then, the best way of conducting primary market research was through alternative methods such as in-person surveys and groups with a random selection of consumers (in other words, Super Soaker observing my reactions after viewing their latest commercial or when drenching my neighborhood friend with the CPS 2000).
I can vividly recollect the times my mom picked me up after school and brought me to companies’ paid marketing surveys to earn a few extra dollars. I remember being required to go in my own cubicle with several of their prototypes on the desk with a survey asking me to “please select the following options” from a multitude of checkboxes after trying their prototypes:
“What are your first thoughts when picking up the water gun?”
• “I like the way this water gun shoots.”
• “This water gun is too heavy, and eventually, I cannot keep holding it.”
• “The water gun is not powerful enough.”
• “I want to go home.”
I’m sure “I want to go home” was not an option, but even as a paid participant, all I could remember was wanting to go home and take my $50.
Quality Is Secondary
This brings us back to today: Brands no longer have to conduct primary market research to guess their next most profitable ad. In light of continually improving technology, social media has granted us the ability to know exactly what the consumer’s desire is, thus making ads much more likely to be accurate in content that addresses those desires, as well as resulting in significantly higher profitability for the brand.
Looking closer at the problem, we all think creating the most profitable ads is about particular features. In reality, we lose focus by caring about aesthetics, how funny the ad is and what the best introduction is to hook the consumer. Or we think that the bigger the budget, the better. We think of other components of great ads, such as high-end cameras, popular spokespeople or influencers, or casts that are bigger than the crowd at my dad’s family Christmas parties (he’s one of seven kids). But really, we’re just digressing to the secondary objective of “how cool” the production can be, whereas we want the ad to be best-performing to ameliorate next quarter’s income statement.
Although the traits above are favorable and can provide the company’s next best-performing ads, brands can achieve the goal on a much smaller budget. For example, Dollar Shave Club did it with their first ad, which they released on only a $4,500 budget resulting in millions of views in a matter of days and, years afterward, $65 million in annual revenue.
Utilizing Two-Way Communication Is Primary
When you want to create ads that take a bigger percentage of your current market share, your primary focus should be on concentrating most of your energy on knowing exactly the consumers’ desire. But doing that today differs from how Super Soaker heard their target market’s desire: Two-way communication allows consumers to comment on your social posts, advertisements and direct messages, and to reply to emails. You can utilize that to capture what consumers say about the content as if Super Soaker could see me say, “Cooool,” while my jaw dropped. And that’s exactly what a two-way communication system is.
Listening to the comments and analyzing them should be as routine as brands like Super Soaker may have surveyed me as a kid. The best part of all of this? It’s documented, authentic feedback from consumers. Even better, you can comment back to their comment to gather more data.
All in all, to create the most profitable ads and bring your company to the next level, treat two-way communication as the root of your company — that’s where you will best find your consumers’ exact desires. If you create content that aligns with what they want, then the more profitable your brand can be. Think of commenting and analyzing the comments as the modern-day tactic of primary market research.
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Author: Justin Richard, Forbes Councils Member
