Revisit your Audience Personas this Holiday

Oh, the holidays… Love them or hate them, they are a great time to boost engagement from a larger audience. When you use the right strategy and targeting, you can grow your audience in a way that benefits you for the New Year and beyond by looking at your audience personas.

But is your company’s targeting strategy in November and December the same as your strategy in June? If it is, chances are there is a valuable audience you are not reaching during the holiday season. 

We tend to focus on gearing our messaging towards the individual who wants the product. During the holidays, we continue with this strategy (because who doesn’t love a good self-care Christmas present) but also put a special focus on our secondary audience personas: gift-givers.

Click here to download the complete guide to timing your holiday campaigns.

Primary vs secondary demographics targeting 

If you have spent time finding your primary audience personas, you have learned your audience’s likes, dislikes, interests… a general understanding of who they are and what they are looking for in a product.

Holidays can turn this original targeting strategy on its head – because you want to target the individuals who will be buying gifts for your primary audience. This will drastically change your demographics surrounding gender, age, interests, and life stage. 

Primary audience: the individuals buying products for themselves or with themselves in mind. 

Secondary audience: individuals that don’t fit the demographics of your primary audience, but will be the individuals purchasing for your primary audience. 

Picture the husband purchasing a gift for his wife, or a mother gifting to her son. The people you target don’t fit the mold to buy your product for themselves but are valuable to reach out to on behalf of their gift list. 

Example: Your primary audience is females aged 18-25. Your secondary audience could be males aged 18-29, or females aged 55-65 with adult female children. 

Customize your strategy to your secondary audience personas

If you plan on offering the same UVP or CTA to your secondary audience your campaign is DOA. (If you plan on offering the same Unique Value Proposition or Call To Action to your secondary audience your campaign is Dead On Arrival.) Your secondary audience has a different reason for why they are considering buying this product. Understanding each audience, their pain points, and how your product is a solution will guide you to the correct ad strategy for your secondary audience.

Since your secondary demographics audience is not purchasing for themselves, when you reach out, you need to offer context. Ads without context will lead to your ad targeting seem like a mistake. Context can look like offering the product up as a great holiday list, or it can even be giving info on who would love the product as a gift. Everyone is looking for a way to be the best dad/girlfriend/daughter/friend through their gifting. Make sure it is clear that your product will do just that.

Segment Segment Segment 

Segmenting your audiences lets you add more concrete context to your UV and CTA.  Market segmentation is the process of categorizing your audience into groups based on characteristics. In many cases, this is based on location, interests, age group, or other significant demographics. For holiday campaigns, a great market segmentation strategy would be the relationship to your primary audience.

Tailor your strategy to parent-specific campaigns, partner campaigns, or any relationship dynamic that makes sense for your product or service. 

Once you have your audience segments, create a tailored ad design that has maximum resonance with each segment. For example, a father buying a gift for his son would not be impacted by the same ad as a girlfriend.

Consider Reviews-based campaign content 

Shows reviews to the products from your primary market – in other words, individuals similar to the individuals your secondary audience is shopping for. This can take out the mystery of your product and reinforce it’s a good option for a gift.  Word-of-mouth marketing from trusted sources is still the most powerful form of product promotion. When you can’t ask the trusted source (because gifts are surprises) the next best thing is product reviews. 84% of people trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends.

Including reviews in your ad and content strategy is the best way to promote the value of your product without coming off as sales-y or pushy. The idea here is to convey the message ‘We’re too humble to brag about our product, but here are several happy customers who will do it for us.’

When fusing your segmentation and reviews content strategies, you can paint a beautifully specific picture to your market segment. By highlighting stories of how happy people were to be gifted this product, you are offering this secondary audience a glimpse into the future of what purchasing this gift would look like.

This also minimizes the extra research needed before committing to the product of service. Your gift buyers don’t want to go in blind, so offering these reviews off the bat takes out some of the stress behind deciding if it’s a quality gift. 

Once you start looking at how much goes into just creating a holiday ad, the rest of your multi-platform holiday strategy may seem overwhelming. To learn more about creating a well-rounded holiday strategy, check out our B2B Digital Marketing for the holidays made easy.

Ready to make the most of your holiday marketing strategy? Reach out to the Dowitcher team!