Many marketing strategists believe increasing ad spend is the best way to raise awareness and conversion. This blanket approach to messaging attempts to find the venues with the most eyeballs and tell the most compelling stories. But if there is one lesson to be learned from the last decade, people respond far better to messaging targeted to their needs. And needs arise from the situations people find themselves in.
Let me restate that: People respond far better, purchase more often, and remain more loyal when marketers design campaigns that are targeted to their situations. Not to their personalities. Not to their preferences. And not necessarily to their past purchase behavior.
Consumers today have access to powerful tools that help them manage their situational needs. They also have new behavioral attributes that help them manage their ever-changing situations and powerful tools. They get into “modes.”
A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that people get into temporarily. Think mommy mode, work mode, beast mode, and so on. Unlike habits or routines, modes are tailored to the situation at hand. And people use their technologies to help them stay in modes, or, when the mode is negative, to get them out of it. The brands that understand consumer modes can effectively target the mode and support the buying process of anyone who is in that mode.
Ten years ago, Red Roof Inn was completely outmatched in online search advertising. The hotelier’s competitors—Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt—could outspend the company hands down. With no way to break through using purchase power, the marketers at Red Roof Inn did something extraordinary. They figured out how to target ad spending to situations when people’s flights were canceled.
When your flight is canceled, there is an immediate need that arises from the situation. And almost all people get into negative mode. Crisis mode, wait-and-see mode, and recovery mode—all of which are part of canceled flight mode.
What Red Roof Inn did so effectively was use simple data about flight cancellations to send tailored mobile ads to people who were likely affected, leveraging search data, flight data, weather data, geodata, time of day, and other indicators. Because they were first, the results were incredible.
With far fewer resources, Red Roof Inn reached and converted customers who, by their admission, “would otherwise be unattainable.”
