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Focus on the target audience: how to create competent creative

What is the most important thing in a successful advertising campaign? A quality product and correctly selected marketing tools. But even more important is competent and talented creativity, designed for the right target audiences.

Olga Metz, Marketing  and PR Director of hh.ru spoke about how to be creative wisely at the Synergy Online Forum .

What is the difference between competent and illiterate creativity?

Today, there is a serious fight for the attention accurate mobile phone number list and loyalty of consumers on the market. You have literally seconds to form a particular emotion in the target audience (TA) associated with your product. And here you can’t do without creativity. But what distinguishes competent creativity that the consumer will “hear”?

Precision of the message. It must be understandable to the audience it is intended for. Creative work fails when the advertiser does not take into account the specifics of the target audience’s perception.

How we learned to be creative correctly

For the first 15 years, HeadHunter focused on “white collars”, but we wanted to become a job search platform for all types of employees. To do this, we needed to adapt the product to all target audiences. And the first step in this direction was changing the “popular” name of the platform.

 

For example, a woman looking for a job as a cashier in Orenburg does not understand what HeadHunter is . This word is foreign to her. So we decided to call ourselves hh .ru more often.

 

However, we had to not only reach a new audience, don’t click on suspicious links but also retain the old one. To do this, we began to approach creative solutions more carefully, and here we did not avoid serious mistakes.

Focus on the perception of the target audience

The main mistake was that when creating advertising, we focused primarily on ourselves. People in the agencies where we ordered creative had a similar perception of life and humor. We shot videos and were confident in their wit and topicality. At that time, we did not think at all that the audience could not understand our message or interpret it negatively.

 

For example, we filmed an ad where a man in a T-shirt in front of the TV was interviewed online. It was a sarcastic story about an interview at home, which seemed funny and witty to us. However, it did not seem so to our target audience – the video was not popular. We realized that we did something wrong and began to conduct focus groups in the regions. It turned out that jokes about work are not relevant for “blue collars”, they do not understand them. It also turned out that the topic of the interview is not close to them. 

 

After that, we got into the habit of holding focus groups contact lists among different target audiences. This allows us to get more deeply involved in the process and create creative content that will be understandable to the audience.

 

For example, we filmed a video where a senior driver hired a junior. They negotiate, the senior pats the junior on the shoulder, they turn away from the audience and walk towards the cars. And everything seems clear, but this scene raised big questions during focus groups. For some reason, people from Vladivostok to Penza thought that the senior driver was a fraud. We started to find out, and it turned out that people were confused by the pat on the shoulder and the fact that the heroes of the video turned their backs. On the contrary, it seemed to us that the senior driver made a trusting and friendly gesture.

 

This story vividly explains why it is important to focus on the perception of the target audience. Otherwise, we would have launched the video and not received any response from the new audience we were fighting for.

Remember that the perception of the target audience may differ dramatically from yours. The solution is to carefully study the audience and generate messages that they will correctly understand.

And competent creativity is precisely that which the target audience not only sees, but also “hears”.

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