Marketers and communicators admit they don’t always know if their messages are reaching the intended audiences. Yet most believe those messages— when they make it to the target—are relevant. Uh, maybe not, a new study says.
Looking at online ads, for example, the overwhelming majority of marketers (70%) say their content is relevant to the intended target. Too bad then that only 27% of consumers say those ads are at least “often relevant.” And just 8% of consumers feel the ads they see online are “always relevant,” says State of Digital Advertising 2018, from Adobe.
Look at chart A. Marketers overwhelmingly believe their CTAs in online banner ads are “directly relevant” to target audiences. Consumers who saw it that way were barely out of the single digits.
Fine, you say, “But my content is quality and resonates with the target audience.” Maybe so, but the survey of 1,000 consumers and 250 digital marketers argues it doesn’t much matter. Respondents indicate it’s about as easy to ignore relevant as less-relevant content.
Chart B, which illustrates the ease of ignoring relevant and irrelevant online ads, indicates regardless of whether or not people think your online ad is relevant to them, at least half of them find it easy to ignore.
It’s tough to put all the blame on marketers and communicators, though. The deck is stacked. The relevance of a message seems linked to a person’s channel preference and has little to do with the quality of the content (chart C).
For example, social media is the most relevant channel for Millennials (42%) & Gen Z (50%). Generation Xers, Baby Boomers and those older overwhelmingly prefer TV. Men across the board see TV as more relevant than women do (52% to 43%), while women prefer social media as the most relevant channel (35% to 22%) vs men.
Most Millennials and Gen Zers think social media ads are the most relevant; most Gen Xers and Baby Boomers think TV ads are the most relevant, as this next chart illustrates.
More uplifting takeaways for communicators and marketers include the outlook for social. In a finding that seems counterintuitive, the study reveals social media drives 3x more traffic for non-customers than customers. For example, non-customers of a brand are 3 times more likely than a customer to visit the brand’s social media.
Mobile’s permanency looks good, too. As consumers continue to move toward social for numerous parts of their lives, marketers are reacting by increasing average monthly spend on digital marketing by nearly 5% year over year (left column, chart D). Yet average spend on mobile was up 23% in ’17.
