1. Treat every customer as unique

Traditional market segmentation strategies, such as buyer personas, risk oversimplifying consumer behaviour and reducing your audience to a series of rigid stereotypes. To build authentic connections with audiences, impactful advertising needs to ensure that customers are acknowledged as being unique.

By harnessing empathy and eliciting emotion, it’s possible to make your audience engaged at an individual level without resorting to cut-and-paste personalisation tactics.

2. Never underestimate the ordinary

When advertising resonates with audiences with real lives and emotions, they feel valued and understood. So while celeb-studded aspirational campaigns can be appealing, in depicting the everyday – from shared struggles to small moments of joy – brands can break down barriers and connect with people on a more personal level.

This is especially the case for marginalised groups who, too often tokenised or othered, long for authentic representation on screen. To deliver this, brands must go beyond visibility to embrace storytelling that draws upon a range of authentic cultural realities, no matter how mundane. Although this may seem confining when catering to mass audiences, it has been shown that advertising featuring those typically underrepresented has the power to engage and unite everyone.

3. Break the mould

To connect with customers in a congested online environment, it is crucial to stand out from the crowd. It’s easy to fall into patterns of constraint by your industry, and even your own brand! Looking outside at other industries and sectors can unlock untapped sources of inspiration, spark innovation, and help breathe new life into your campaigns.

Don’t forget about the power of deep data and insights. With performance-driven campaigns relying on surface-level data, delving deeper into the consumer mindset can unearth opportunities for you to do something different.

4. Be curious

Before harnessing any data to target specific audiences or optimise campaign performance, it is crucial to interrogate it.

Quantitative data should always be accompanied by the qualitative. It isn’t enough to just be aware of what your customers are doing, you need to know the how, where, when, and, most importantly, why. Combining and cross-validating insights from multiple data sources allows you to achieve a more genuine and holistic understanding of your customers motivations and how you can meet their needs.

5. Target contexts

Ultimately, advertising is about reaching the right person, on the right device, at the right time.

Customers in a relaxed frame of mind are more likely to notice and engage with marketing communications. Targeting customers during moments of mundanity when they’re feeling positive can, therefore, significantly enhance the effectiveness of any campaign.

While we cannot track individual emotions, analysing broader trends in mood and mental availability can help pinpoint moments to optimise your targeting strategy. Category entry points are also another key consideration when it comes to context. For example, after a significant life event, such as getting married or starting a new job, customers are more likely to consider a new brand.

6. Meet your customers where they are

To stay relevant, brands must meet audiences where they are. Social media has made brands far more accessible to customers and given that over 82% of the UK population are active social media users, brands cannot afford to compromise on their online presence.

Staying up to date with online culture and trends that resonate with your brand can enhance relevance and provide a wealth of insights and inspiration for future communications and campaigns. Embrace organic online communities, identify the influencers and creators that reach and resonate well with your target audience and work with them to curate engaging and insightful content.

7. Take ownership and accountability

Having a strong online presence and meaningfully engaging with your audience on their preferred platforms means that you’ll get feedback, both positive and negative. What you do with this feedback will play an inestimable role in shaping your brand’s reputation.

The fact is, we can’t always get it right. While it may be tempting to delete negative reviews from aggrieved individuals, they can actually be a valuable asset for your business by establishing trust and authenticity.

When mistakes happen, by admitting fault and accepting accountability, other claims made by your brand are strengthened and deemed believable by consumers. Negative reviews also provide the perfect opportunity to demonstrate exceptional customer service and be perceived as a brand that is actively listening to and learning from its audience. By taking consumer criticisms on board, you’ll be able to identify any weaknesses in your processes and optimise accordingly.

8. Don’t just say, do

It’s more important than ever for your brand to practice what it preaches. People value proof over promise, so any stances taken on social issues must be supported by transparency around your company's inner workings, from climate impact to employee diversity.

Globally, nearly two thirds of customers prefer to buy from companies whose purpose reflects their own values and beliefs. Your brand’s values should permeate throughout every level of your business and reflect your audience. Understanding what matters most to them can provoke meaningful conversations and increase brand engagement and advocacy.

9. Don’t neglect offline

With an abundance of digital marketing tools at our fingertips, we must be careful to not entirely overlook offline advertising.

Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising offers a wealth of opportunities to raise brand awareness and connect with customers beyond their screens. Through a combination of strategic geo-targeted placements in high traffic areas and memorable messaging and creative, offline advertising can speak directly to local communities, building authenticity and connection and markedly increasing spontaneous brand recall. And, unlike digital advertising, OOH ads cannot be skipped or evaded using ad-blockers, ensuring 24/7 exposure and high visibility.

Innovative and impactful offline advertising often serves as a catalyst for media coverage and brand engagement. As well as encouraging audiences to interact with and amplify your content on their own social media platforms, the integration of hashtags and QR codes in OOH media also helps bridge the gap between your offline and online communications, optimising the effectiveness of your campaign by creating a seamless customer journey.

10. Test, measure, and learn

As we know, there is no one-fits-all approach, therefore testing, measuring, and learning is key to shaping an effective strategy for your brand. Whether you’re refining your messaging, experimenting with different channels, or trying something completely new, by analysing key performance indicators, you can learn what resonates best with your audience and optimise accordingly.

In summary

While quantifiable, data-driven metrics such as click-through-rates, impressions, and return on investment are essential to making informed, objective decisions that increase marketing effectiveness, it’s important to not lose sight of the genuine relationship being cultivated between your customers and your brand. By paying attention to and acting on direct feedback you’ll gain a more nuanced understanding of your customers, enabling you to further refine your strategy.