Your organization may be having an internal meeting about how and when to go back into market with advertising post Covid-19.
If you are in the planning stages of “how” to message to consumers when the time comes here are several steps, you can take to simplify what may seem like an overwhelming task.
Example steps are for a city preparing to advertise to potential leisure travelers:
- Use your 1st party data to create high level personas. Using your demographic data from your eCRM database, your social channels and your website data to segment your audiences to build initial personas. Do you have age demo, number of people in household and any interest your visitors have? A couple of example personas: Female age 24-44, children in the house, interest of kid actives, money saving and outdoor activities for the whole family and live in the suburbs. Another example persona could be: couples, age 35-55, no kids, interest in fine dining & arts and culture and live in urban areas.
- Once you have the personas built out it’s time to rank then into order of importance to your destination. This is important to understand how many different messages you need to create for each persona and when deciding on how much budget you will allocate to each persona.
- Now it’s time to build messaging per persona. Conduct a brainstorming session with your team and brief them on the personas. Don’t put any limitations on the number of messages per persona or any messaging. Ask a simple question to start build out messages flowing for each persona:
I am a ________________ and I want __________________.
I am a Mom and I want to get away with my family but not spend a lot of money.
I am a Mom and I want to enjoy a vacation the whole family will enjoy.
I am a Wife and I want to enjoy a romantic weekend with my husband.
I am a Dad and I want to take the family on an outdoor adventure.
I am a Husband and I want a night out with my wife and other adults.
Build out as many phases as possible for each persona and group all the similar phases together. From these grouping you will be able to see the wants and needs of each persona and be able to prioritize the micro-messaging for each persona based on the groupings.
- When working on the advertising messaging for each grouping be specific and address the persona and their wants and needs. Create several messages per grouping to be able and A/B test performance and create a sequential advertising journey.
“Vacation Ideas the Whole Family Will Enjoy”
“Getaway This Weekend Without Spending A lot”
“Couples Only Get Away Ideas”
“The Perfect Romantic Date Weekend” - Most importantly be prepared to be flexible and proactive during this time. Be ready to optimize each persona you are targeting with your advertising. Optimize messaging, audiences, and tactics based on advertising data and website analytics.
When to start advertising that is the harder question to answer. Keep up to date on any local, regional or state level regulations that may affect your visitors. Work closely with your local business to understand what steps they have taken to services the visitors, keep them safe and that they are ready for new visitors. Offer open lines of communications for any questions that may arise from visitors through your social channels, email and phone if needed.
