Chances are you’re working with a team to manage your campaigns. It may be a social media campaign only, or a fully integrated campaign with PR, social, paid and creative teams all doing their part to advance your client’s initiatives.
I’ve worked on dozens of teams like this and it always strikes me as funny – and scary – when it comes time to finalize graphics and messaging on tactics. I say FINALIZE because at this juncture of the campaign, we have already:
- Done research – most likely lots of it
- Developed personas or target audiences and maybe tested messaging with them?
- Created measurable objectives
- Adopted a plan of tactics and strategies to reach those objectives in a specific campaign or over a period of time.
If the graphics and messaging are honoring or adhering to all the things you’ve mutually agreed upon, then why is this final stage such a stumbling block?
Maybe this has happened to you. It might go something like this.
[Client]: I don’t like it.
[Agency]: Can you explain?
[Client]: I don’t know. I just don’t like it.
[Agency]: (checks notes). It’s addressing our target audience “X” with a key message of “Y” to meet our objective of “Z”, so can you give us more specific feedback?
[Client]: Not really. Can you just redo it?
As communicators and marketers, we are then forced into the game of twenty questions to try and elicit the detail necessary to do it over. Because if you don’t, you might be repeating the same scenario with the next revision and on and on it goes.
Aside from the giant problem of an inability to critique and redirect creative (which is a superpower among clients who can do it), what’s underneath is something more fundamental.
You Are Not the Intended Audience for Your Campaign!
It’s difficult to understand the subtle differences between your personal preferences on messaging and that which will resonate with your audience, who may or may not be in your age group, geographic area or state on their life journey.
Two Examples
Any Pharmaceutical Ad
If you’re under the age of 40, you have no doubt seen ads for a wide range of medications many of which are targeted for the 50+ set. You’re baffled by how stupid they sound. Well, you are not the target audience so you either ignore it or reject it.
Food Delivery Services
If you’re over the age of 40, you have no doubt seen ads for food delivery services like Uber Eats or Door Dash. And you quite possibly have also said, who’s that? What? You are baffled by the images moving quickly across the screen and you have no idea who those celebrities are. Again, you are not the target audience so you ignore or reject it.
Three Things to Make Creative Feedback More Meaningful
Pair your research with current materials for that target audience. Create a “look book” of sorts with ads, stories, copy, social posts that you can refer to for your next critiques. Have it handy to share with your client.
Ask more specific questions of your client to elicit more detailed needs about the item being reviewed. Share the background on the piece and its inspiration. Be specific about elements like color, size, scale, format that might need to be changed. This helps them remember and reflect on the research.
Update your feedback style by introducing each piece to set the expectation. Remind them of the audience and the brief. This might yield better feedback for future revisions.
These three action items make it easy to keep your campaign’s target audience top of mind and elicit better feedback as your campaigns evolve.