Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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A business needs to have a steady stream of buyers to find success. This requires seeking them out actively, but when you do, you need to make sure they’re likely to do business with you long-term.  It all comes down to how you go about prospecting your leads. In this guide, we’ll discuss what B2B…
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As marketers, we know the importance of making data-driven decisions. The more information we have about our audience, the more we’re able to make effective marketing moves. 
In addition, having the numbers to back up the implementation of a marketing strategy is almost as important as the strategy itself. One of the ways to get this data is through social media testing, where you figure out what campaigns resonate most with your audience and help you meet your marketing goals.
In this post, learn how you can run a social media test to help you meet your marketing goals and discover high-quality tools that will help you do so. 

For instance, you might run a social test to learn if video campaigns are worth investing in on Facebook, so you create a post that measures impressions of an ad with and without a video attached. After the campaign, the interactions with your post will tell you if a video is a worthwhile investment for your brand, which makes this process so important.
The Benefits of Social Testing
Social media testing is important because it provides data-driven insights about your social media marketing activities. It allows you to analyze how different variables, like photo and video, affect performance.
Ultimately, social media tests provide data about how audience behavior can influence the structure of your campaigns. You’ll get a picture of what is successful for your brand, and you can create campaigns that you know will work. Instead of researching countless industry benchmarks, you’ll have concrete data specific to your business that comes from testing results. 
There are multiple types of social media tests you can run for your business, and we’ll discuss them next.
Types of Social Tests
Let’s say you want to know how copy affects an international audience on LinkedIn. Or, that you want evidence of a landing page performing better with a different image. Maybe you’re trying to identify if changing the tone of Instagram captions will lead to more audience engagement.
All of these scenarios are prime for social tests. They point out a problem that can be answered with data. This data would give insight about audiences interactions with brands on social media.
After identifying the goal, it’s time to pick the type of test. Let’s go through the different types and when you might use them.
A/B Test
A/B tests are likely the most common form of social testing. They look at a variable between two content types, measure the outlined goal, and provide results. So, consider running an A/B test if you want to test a single, small variable that may alter audience behavior.
For example, run an A/B test if you want to test out different CTA buttons on a Facebook ad or experiment with a post’s copy with/without emojis. The image below is an example of what an A/B test can look like. 

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Split Test
Split tests are often confused with A/B tests. In essence, they do the same thing: test two content types based on a goal. The difference is that a split test is more general than an A/B test; they’re used to determine big changes, and the two variants are often entirely different.
Use split testing if you want to know which layout of your Facebook Business page performs better. You can also run split tests to determine A/B test factors. For example, you can run a split test to determine which ad video cut you will use for a Sponsored Tweet, then A/B test different sections of the winning cut. The image below is an example of what a split test could look like on a business website. 
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Multivariable Test
Multivariable tests work differently than the two previously mentioned types, as they work with multiple variables instead of one or two. You can run a multivariable test to determine which of four ads works best. Alternatively, you can run one to assess the different makings of a post, like images vs. copy vs. captions.
Run a multivariate test if you want to see the results of more than two different elements. For example, compare the caption, image, and CTA of a LinkedIn post to see what audiences are responding to, or look at three versions of a GIF to learn how audiences react to them. The image below is an example of a what a multivariate test set up could look like.
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When you’ve picked out your social test experiment, make sure you’re imploring best practices so the results are helpful.
Social Testing Best Practices
Social media testing can be extremely helpful — if you’re executing them correctly. Otherwise, your test could be inaccurate, immeasurable, and ultimately, a waste of time.
The good news is that social tests aren’t hard to create or run. The bad news is that if you aren’t prepared to run one, your results won’t be usable. Make sure that when you design your test, you follow these best practices:
1. Have one specific goal.
When your social test has one identifiable goal, everything else falls into place: variables, unit of measurement and time frame. To illustrate this, let’s say your goal is to improve international engagement with your next Facebook ad.
With that goal decided, you can create the variables, so you decide to run an A/B test to determine which copy earns the most impressions. You estimate that because your impression ads usually run for a month, half that time would give measurable results.
You also know the direction of the ad, so your focused goal makes it easier to know what to look for during analysis. Impressions, for example, would be the metric to look at for the Facebook ad mentioned earlier.
2. Know who your audiences are.
If you decide to conduct a social test, your data will reflect the behaviors of a specific target market and how they engage with your messaging. 
Social testing is a great way to learn about the social media behavior of an audience segment. If you had little to no information about how your millennial audience would react to a new Instagram Story Ad, running a test would give you a data-driven answer.
Without knowing your audience, your data wouldn’t apply to a defined set of your target market. You’d have insight, but it would be unclear how results relate to your different audience segments. 
3. Take note of your current performance.
Before you run the test, know how your current campaign is running or note previous results. Then, at the end of your experiment, you can compare results and make informed decisions. The previous report will give the background information and context needed to analyze the social test findings.
Even if your marketing goals for your social test are different than previous campaigns, it’s still a good idea to refer to them for context. For instance, you may be testing for conversions rather than retargeting, but having an idea of what audiences prefer helps you structure your campaign.
4. Monitor your test periodically.
Don’t leave your test as soon as it begins — monitor it so you can adjust accordingly. A test that’s running for a month, for example, should be checked regularly for performance benchmarks.
If you use social test software or tools on social media channels, the report starts aggregating when your test starts. So, when you check-in, look at how you’re tracking for your #1 goal. Additionally, take note of what other metrics you see and how they’re performing.
You might find, for instance, that your conversion rate is low. You can monitor conversions for the duration of the test or make a minor tweak to try to improve performance. For the subsequent check-ins, you’ll have an additional metric to take into account.
When the test concludes, you’ll have the knowledge from previous checks to round out your perception of the completed report. Along with your intended goal, identify supporting metrics to understand how they work together.
5. Make your test timely.
How long should you run your test? Long enough to get the answer to your hypothesis. That doesn’t tell you much, though, so let’s add to that.
Ideally, your test should run for at least seven days. A week is enough time for your social testing software to compile a basis of data. It won’t be as concrete as a more extended test, but it’s a starting point.
After seven days, look at your performance and decide if you’ve gathered enough data to answer your hypothesis. If not, run the test for a few more days. Then, based on the nature of your campaign, fix the time frame to fit your business and your audience — but make sure you give yourself enough room for an actionable report.
Picking a test duration period ensures you won’t be wasting money and time. Instead of having a test run for too long or too little, figure out your time frame and budget during the planning process.
So, with these best practices in mind, you’re almost ready to run a successful social test. Before you get going, though, let’s talk about where — and how — to do that.
Where can I run a social test?
There’s a couple of avenues to explore when choosing where to run a social network test. If you’re running a test specifically for social media, the channel you’re using might have testing tools in their business software.
Running social tests on the corresponding media platforms is helpful because you don’t have to track different channels during the test. Additionally, you won’t have to worry about misconstrued data a third party might provide.
You can also run a social test using a CRM, like HubSpot. CRMs are a great choice if you want to test functions outside of social media — landing pages, emails, or other marketing activities. First, though, let’s talk about social media offerings.
Facebook Social Testing
Facebook offers tools to run A/B and multivariate tests for ads. You can access these tests via Ad Manager. Ad Manager tells you which ads (or ad tests) are running and their status. When you click on a certain test, details and metrics open.

Multivariate tests on Facebook are similar, except they can be found in the Experiments section of your Facebook Business account. Though the social tests are located in different places, the process for setting them up is largely the same.
Social testing on Facebook is intuitive, especially if you’re used to running Facebook Ads. After clicking “Create Ad,” you’ll be taken through a series of prompts to create, set metrics, and pick an audience. When you fill in the details, you publish it, and wait for the results.
Start small if you’re getting the hang of things. Its features are customizable, so the choice is yours in terms of time frame, audience, copy, testing options, and metrics. As your familiarity grows, tests can be scaled.
As an example, after running a social test on Facebook, bone broth brand Kettle & Fire found a 14 point increase in brand awareness. The marketing team wanted to raise online sales with a video campaign, and wanted to find out which video length was favored by customers.

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In a little less than a month, a 1.5 lift in purchasing consideration and sales conversions from the short video led to the answer. A Facebook test saved the team ad spend and informed them about their audience’s Facebook preferences.
Facebook delivers social testing results in a downloadable report. The software determines the winner based on the metric(s) you chose when creating the test. For information about running a Facebook social testing, check out this post about testing on the platform.
Twitter Social Testing
Social testing on Twitter leads to creating tweets audiences will interact with and enjoy. You’ll identify how they use the platform and know how to cater to their needs. Twitter’s testing tools are best fit for creative, targeting, and brand awareness campaigns.

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Twitter lets you social test Ads in an A/B format. To do this, after publishing the ad, go back into Ads, duplicate it, make the change, and publish the new variable. Track performance from the Tweet Activity Dashboard and campaign dashboard. 
Note that there’s no way to set an official test using Twitter, so you’ll have to analyze the data yourself. For instance, if you want to see if your new brand voice is taking flight, you’ll probably want to look at the amount of clicks and impressions your Ad earned.
LinkedIn Social Testing
If you’re not used to LinkedIn Ads, there’s several different types. They’re sorted based on campaign goal, like Conversion, or type of ad, like Carousel, Text, or Sponsored. It’s a great idea to test LinkedIn Ads for promoting — your brand, event, or job listing.
Dynamic Ads, which show up on the ride side of a user’s main feed are highly personalized. Under Dynamic Ads, there’s several versions: Follower, Job, Content, and Spotlight. These versions specify what the goal of your ad is — so if you want to let audiences know your company is hiring, you would run a Dynamic Job Ad.

If you wanted to make a similar Dynamic Job Ad on LinkedIn, you can run a test to see if your listing ad is compelling to job seekers. You’ll have the option to test image layouts, such as the company photo, copy, and central images, if applicable.
LinkedIn’s marketing team uses social testing for content and event promotion, as well as account-based marketing. They ran a test for a webinar Dynamic Ad to gauge if audiences preferred an image of the speaker or the company’s logo. According to one of LinkedIn’s senior marketing managers, Cassandra Clark, results included a 326% lift in click-through rate in the ad with the speaker.
To access ad results, check your Conversion Tracking dashboard, which will show you page and audience activity from your ads. While LinkedIn doesn’t have a formal testing feature, they do have an option for you to duplicate and tweak a portion of an ad, like Twitter.
CRM Social Testing
If you’re not running a test on a social media channel, using a CRM is another worthwhile option. With a CRM, you can set up tests for website content, like landing pages. 
In HubSpot, you can run social tests for web pages simply by accessing your dashboard and going to one of your web pages. Click the “Actions” hyperlink next to one of your pages, and you’ll find the option to “Run a test.”
HubSpot lets you run an A/B or multivariate (Adaptive) test. As you’re creating your test, you’ll have the option to look at testing tips, like figuring out what to test. Since HubSpot has a drag-and-drop editor, and tons of modules to choose from, you’ll have plenty of options. In the past, I’ve run tests for CTA buttons, images, headline copy, body text, and landing page layout through social media.
It’s commonplace for CRMs to have tools for running social testing. Some offer a niche version of social testing; for instance, MailChimp’s are for emails. When you decide to use a CRM for testing, do some research to determine which one will offer you the tools you need to succeed.
But, if you don’t know where to begin looking for software that offers social testing, here’s a list of tools for your benefit.
1. HubSpot
Price: Free plan, or $800 for Marketing Hub Professional
With HubSpot’s CRM, you can run A/B and multivariate tests. The tools are part of HubSpot’s Marketing Software and are included in the Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise plans. You can use HubSpot to test landing pages that are promoted through social media.

The CRM’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to configure variables for tests. In addition, you’ll have optimization features to make your page shareable and user-friendly, like social media badges. That way, when you promote the page on socials, your followers can share them with one click.
HubSpot’s testing tool is accessible from the landing page dashboard via “Run a test” from the drop-down menu. From there, you can choose your test type and get started. If you want an easy-to-use platform that lets you create and analyze social tests, HubSpot is a great choice.
2. OptinMonster
Price: Free plan, or $19-49/mo.
OptinMonster is a CRM that also offers built-in testing software. You can run A/B or split tests to increase conversions over time with tools that let you experiment with content, headlines, campaign triggers, styles, and layouts.
Once you set up the test, you can leave the software to do the work. It’ll show your test content to website visitors and collect data on conversion rates. Your report will determine the number of impressions, acquisitions, and page visits.

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You can use OptinMonster’s testing tool to test social media landing pages. Test the landing page’s effectiveness for your next ebook offer before it’s published on LinkedIn first. If you want a platform that offers intuitive tools for social testing, try OptinMonster.
3. Optimizely
Price: Case-by-case basis, contact sales for pricing
If you’re heavily promoting your website on social media, test it to learn how it performs among your audience. One way you can do that is with Optimizely, which provides marketing software solutions.

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Optimzely’s tools let you perform split and multivariate tests. Optimizely will count the number of website visitors and the metrics you pick, such as engagement, goals, conversions, and clicks. You’ll be able to apply custom audience segments that can be filtered based on social proof performance.
4. Leadpages
Price: Free, or $48-$199/mo.
If you want a tool specifically for testing landing pages you promote on social media, try Leadpages. This is software that was made just for building professional landing pages. You can use the split testing feature with the tool.
When you run split tests with Leadpages, you’ll be able to access its analytics the minute it aggregates traffic and engagements. At the conclusion, you’ll get a report that includes the total and unique visits, conversions and total conversion rate. Your report will also include specific insights about test variations.

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Keep in mind that you can’t set a time frame for your tests. From the analytics dashboard, you’ll be able to see how many days your test has been running. When you’re ready for the test to be complete, you’ll have to end it manually. 
5. Inspectlet
Price: Free, or $39-$499/mo.
Inspectlet was created just for testing. It’s a software that lets you test multiple different content types, including web pages. You can also create content variations for future social tests, like edited graphics.
The visual editor in Inspectlet makes it easy to code or create different pages. You can change your page’s design or code in real-time and access analytics as soon as the test begins. Inspectlet lets you track views, page elements, unique visitors, and custom events.
When you access your performance report, you’ll get the metrics based on the goals you set. This can be anything from tracking clicks, user engagement, custom events, or URL views. Basically, anything that you can track with the software can be measured.
Now, you have a couple of options separate from social media sites that you can social test with. With this in mind, you’re ready to run the test.
Think back to the example in the beginning of the post. Knowing all you do about social testing now, you’re fully equipped to run a video engagement experiment of your own. Will it be on a social channel or with testing software?
One of the many great things about social testing is how creative they can be — you can social test just about any piece of content, and social media sites are starting to make that process easy. Testing your social ads ensures you’re providing the most value to your customers, and now, you can.

As a writer, I’ve never been very good at math. I know … shocking.
Most marketers can relate because as a bunch, we tend to be better at English and history than math and science.
However, as a marketer, we need to be able to analyze data and calculate the effectiveness of an article or campaign, even though math might not be our strong suit.
One of the calculations we need to run and metrics we need to track is return on ad spend (ROAS).
Below, let’s review ROAS. In this post, we’ll discuss what ROAS is, how it’s different from ROI, and how to calculate it.

Ultimately, ad spend is meant to measure the effectiveness of a specific ad campaign, not your overall ROI — more on that below.
Besides ROAS, you’ll most likely measure other metrics such as click-through rate and ROI. By measuring multiple metrics, you’ll get a more accurate view of your results.
Of course, measuring performance and tracking analytics is an important part of any marketing campaign.
By tracking performance, you can improve and iterate on your marketing techniques. Plus, data is one of the only ways to truly prove that your department brings in revenue, which is incredibly important.
However, it’s important to note that not everything can be measured with quantitative data. For instance, calculating brand awareness and sentiment is much more difficult. And while you can calculate downloads or email sign-ups, those might not always lead to revenue.
When you’re analyzing any data, it’s important to consider context and review qualitative data as well as quantitative data.
That being said, today we’re going to dive into ROAS specifically. Before we do that, let’s review how ROAS is different from ROI.

Ultimately, this means that the only cost considered in a ROAS calculation is the cost of advertising. On the other hand, the cost of an entire project or campaign will be considered in an ROI calculation.
The goal of your ads campaign, of course, will be to generate a positive return on your ad spend. However, how can you determine what that ad spend should be?
In the YouTube video below, HubSpot details how to determine ad spend by understanding the bidding system used by ad networks.

You’d use ROAS to help you determine how you spend your advertising budget and as a signal to determine if your campaigns are successful. This would let you know that you might need to evaluate your approach to running ads.
So, at this point, you might be wondering, “How can I calculate ROAS?” Let’s review that now.
While the equation is simple, you might face difficulty gathering the data needed to run this calculation. For instance, calculating the cost of an ad isn’t always easy. You’ll need to consider the cost of the ad bid, the labor cost for the time it took to create the creative assets, vendor costs, and affiliate commissions.
But it’s important to get an accurate estimate of the actual money spent on an ad to get an accurate ROAS measurement. If your data isn’t accurate, your findings won’t be either.
Additionally, if you don’t run an ecommerce business, it can also be difficult to measure the revenue generated by an ad. For example, someone might convert from your ad because they downloaded an ebook, however, they haven’t spent any money yet. In fact, they might not spend money for months.
To combat this, you can use a CRM software like HubSpot in conjunction with HubSpot Ads, to track revenue made from leads.
With a CRM and ads software, you can keep track of your data and tie it all together — marketing leads, ad results, etc.

Now, you might be wondering, “What’s a good ROAS?” and “How can I improve my ROAS?”
Well, a good ROAS is typically around 3:1. If you’re barely breaking even, it might be time to dig further into the accuracy of your metrics and evaluate your ads and bidding strategy.
However, it’s important to note that the objective of some ad campaigns might not be to make immediate revenue but to increase brand awareness. If that’s your objective, then a lower ROAS makes sense.
What is a good ROAS?
Depending on the medium, return on ad spend can be anywhere from $4-11 for every dollar spent on advertising.
In the graphic below, you can see the ROAS per dollar invested in the United States in 2018, by the medium.
For each dollar invested in digital search advertising, U.S. advertisers gained about 11 U.S. dollars, making it the medium with the highest return on advertising spending.

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How to Increase ROAS
To improve your ROAS, you can lower your ad spend and review your ads campaigns. You might want to optimize your landing pages or rethink your negative keywords.
Overall, ROAS is an important metric to track, but it shouldn’t be tracked in a vacuum. It’s important to look at other data and metrics to get the full picture of your return on investment.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

I first heard about “hard skills” and “soft skills” in high school.
Hard skills seemed to be the ones that everyone wanted, and soft skills were just personality traits that were nice to have.
This worried me, as I saw myself as more of a people person than an academic.
But, as I transitioned into college and the workplace, I found that soft skills are just as important, if not more important, than hard skills. While technical knowledge can get you a first-round interview, how you interact with others in an interview and in collaborative projects can seal the deal.
Here, let’s dive into the difference between soft and hard skills — plus, how you can include both on your resume to stand out to potential employers.

Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
According to an article by HubSpot, soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and personality traits that make it easy to get along and work harmoniously with other people.
On the other hand, hard skills are specific, technical abilities required to do a job, and are usually acquired through education and experience. It’s helpful to look at these in comparison to each other, especially when building a resume.
Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills on a Resume
However tempting it may be to mass-distribute your resume when applying for jobs, resumes are not one-size-fits-all. Today’s diverse workplace means that different roles require tailored sets of skills.
The “skills” section is an excellent place for customization because it highlights how well you fit into a role, as well as what makes you unique as a candidate. To figure out which skills to list, start with the job description of the position for which you’re applying in the “desired skills” or “requirements” section. Hunt for keywords a company is looking for, such as “project management,” “fluent in Mandarin,” or “proficient in HTML/CSS.”
For soft skills in particular, a tip is to look at the company website to get a feel for the culture/tone of the company and find out which qualities are most valued in employees. Specifically, if the company has “Careers,” “Mission,” or “About” sections, these are great places to start.
As an aspiring HubSpot intern, one scan of the “Careers” section of the website led me to notice that the “HEART” culture code was featured prominently. I knew it would likely be mentioned in the interview, which is why I listed soft skills like “empathetic team player” on my resume.
Feeling under-qualified for your dream job? Thankfully, both hard skills and soft skills can be improved over time. In addition to traditional methods such as classes and on-the-job training, taking online courses is an accessible way to improve both hard and soft skills. There are also certification courses, such as Content Marketing or Google Analytics, that not only provide training but also tangible evidence of skills for employers.
If you need help identifying and developing your soft skills, a personality or strengths finder tests like this one can help.

Examples of Soft Skills
Empathy
One of the key components of an emotionally intelligent employee/leader is empathy. If you can understand your coworkers and clients, you are better able to collaborate with them and build authentic relationships.
One way to practice empathy is to be an active listener: Hold space for whatever others are going through and try to understand their perspectives.
Communication
Going hand in hand with empathy, being able to communicate with people from diverse backgrounds is key in the workplace. In addition, with Slack, email, Zoom calls, and in-person meetings, an effective employee must know how to communicate clearly across various platforms.
Adaptability
In our ever-changing workplace, having flexibility and a positive attitude toward change is of utmost importance. Make sure to have concrete examples of your adaptability to bring up in a cover letter or interview.
As someone applying for a remote position at HubSpot, I made sure to highlight my previous remote work experiences. I also discussed my time in both the advertising and automotive industries to showcase my adaptability.
Examples of Hard Skills
Bilingual/multilingual ability
According to Fortune, globalization in this post-pandemic era is being “radically transformed.” As a result, knowing different languages can give you a major advantage in the job market.
In addition to English, Mandarin, German, and Spanish are the top languages desired for international business. If you haven’t spoken a foreign language since senior year of high school, an app like DuoLingo is a fun and straightforward way to help you brush up.
SEO Marketing
For all companies with an online presence, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), plays a huge part in attracting and retaining customers. Resources like The Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz (an SEO tools and software company) are a great way to start.
Data Analytics
Data analytics is the process of obtaining insights from raw data in order to observe trends and draw conclusions. The best method for mastering this skill is through “learning by doing” — and the great news is, many of the top data analytics tools are free.
You can start with trusty old Excel/Google Sheets and learn commands through video tutorials. Programming languages, such as R and Python, are in high demand due to their powerful data analysis capabilities, and both are free and open source.
And there you have it! Understanding the importance of hard and soft skills is critical to both landing a job and growing in one. Hopefully this post has helped you understand the full differences between the two.

 

 

Negative Target Group is one of the less known marketing tools. Used well, it can be extremely effective. It helps you create better content, better target your ads, let those marketing dollars stretch further, and ultimately results in increased ROI. Keep reading to learn how to find negative buyer personas and what you can learn from them?

 

McKinsey study shows that ads tailored to clients’ needs can significantly increase ROI – up to 8 times, and lift sales of at least 10%. Businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads. This is a very good starting point for considering whether you are spending your marketing dollars well. If your ROI is below that two dollars, then you have a lot of room for optimizing your spending. There are many ways to do this, but the key here is to get your targeting right and identify your target audience.

 

The first step is certainly to determine the buyer persona. Once this is established, you create target groups to which you target particular campaigns and advertising creations. However, sometimes it happens that despite establishing a target group, you generate a lot of traffic but it does not translate into conversions. This could mean that the group you have chosen includes people who only seem to fit into it. You can use them as a basis for creating a negative buyer persona.

 

What is a negative target group?

 

Negative target group, negative target market, negative target persona – these are all terms for people and groups of people who, for various reasons, you don’t want to target with your message because they are not the recipients of what you offer. These are the people who will come to your event, enjoy the free samples, but won’t leave any valuable data nor become customers in the future. These are the people who will buy your product and then leave a negative online review because it doesn’t fit their needs, even though it seemed like a good fit when they saw the ad and purchased it. These are the people who will be the most problematic customers because their expectations will not match the promise you give along with the product.

 

Why is it important to spot a negative target market?

 

One would think that a negative buyer persona is someone you would want to avoid like the plague. In a sense, this is true. However, to effectively exclude them when targeting your marketing message, it’s good to know who they are in the first place. Since it could be that the negative buyer persona of product A is your ideal buyer persona of product B, it’s very possible that they are in your database. And they are absolutely not personae non gratae that you absolutely do not want in your database. They’re simply customers who will only buy a certain product group and have no interest in the others. Therefore, determining the negative target group for your service or product will allow you to use exclusions wisely in individual campaigns, and to tailor conditional and dynamic content accordingly in personalized email and website communication.

 

How do you find a negative buyer persona?

 

There are various methods of extracting negative buyer persona that are coming up at different stages of building a marketing strategy. Today, I will focus on how to find and tag them on the Customer Data Platform (CDP). In your negative target group you can include:

 

individuals who visited a website or specific URL by accident, such as clicking unintentionally on a Facebook ad. These are people who disappeared from the website without any interaction after visiting it once.
persons who are 90% interested in products from category X (read about them, visit URLs of selected categories, buy specific products), but make a single purchase from category Y (e.g. as a gift).
people who were interested in a product a long time ago, but bought it once, or did not buy it at all.
people who have relocated, so some of the location-based offers no longer apply to them and may even be annoying.
those whose needs have changed with age (or with the age of their children).
individuals who are interested in the subject matter, but not interested in the products (e.g. football fans reading news about their favorite team’s rivals). This would be, for example, a group that goes to a blog and reads content but never enters a store, or a person who has gone through a Lead Nurturing cycle for a specific interest category but has not done any micro conversions.
a group that meets the target audience but has not shown any purchase activity, subscribes to newsletters but never clicks on them, or does not respond to emails with promotions.

 

What data to look for when creating a negative target group?

 

To create a negative buyer persona, you can use a range of information. The choice of data will largely depend on what insights you have, what type of eCommerce you are running, and what the main assumptions are about this anti-persona. It’s certainly worth paying attention to:

 

transactional data,
subscription activity,
website activity,
mobile application activity,
demographic data (age, location),
declarative data,
interest-related segments and activity within them,
predictive data.

 

Putting them together properly in SALESmanago’s Hyper Segmentation Center will give you the desired result of ready-made segments of people to whom you don’t want to sell certain products or services.

 

How to use a negative buyer persona?

 

Once you have neatly tagged negative target groups for specific products, product categories or services, you can start using them to improve your marketing communications.

 

Area #1 PPC

 

The first thing that pops to mind, is naturally excluding these people from PPC campaigns. This is an area where your spend optimization is quickest to spot and most visible. Excluding negative buyer personas from individual campaigns will allow you to wisely control conversion rates, as well as increase customer satisfaction with purchased products and services. However, that’s not all. After all, marketing doesn’t end with Google and Facebook. Other marketing channels will also greatly benefit from isolating the negative target market.

 

Area #2 Email & Website

 

When creating email campaigns, you can focus on tailoring the message to the best buyer personas, and when selecting the group of addressees, exclude those who are in the negative target group. Such an approach will have a positive impact on your mailing statistics. It will reach only those who are interested in the product itself. This will translate into increase in such indicators as open rate (OR), click-through rate (CTR), as well as conversions supported in this channel. What’s more, better targeting of email campaigns will also benefit your reputation. Fewer messages will be ignored and marked as spam.

 

This doesn’t mean you have to suddenly create hundreds of campaigns just to target each person individually. CDP gives you the opportunity to hyper-personalize your content. What this means in practice is that each of your audience can get a message tailored 1:1 to their needs and interests.

 

You can also use the negative buyer persona by creating messages with conditional content. In this scenario you prepare one creation to which you can add dynamically changing elements. They will be different for different people receiving the email. It works similarly with the content on a web page. Conditional and dynamic content changes the landscape of your site so that visitors only see what interests them.

 

You can also highlight features disliked by the negative buyer persona in different content to keep those people from buying a product that doesn’t satisfy them.

 

Area #3 Product Development

 

Another application of negative buyer persona is in the area related to Product Development. Analyzing your negative target audience, including their habits, behaviors, and transactions, allows you to find areas of your product that, while seemingly attractive, may seem difficult to some buyers. If you want your product to be more versatile, you can focus on developing the discovered areas to tailor it or creating an alternate version of it for this group as well. Doing so will allow you to increase your audience pool and create an even better product. You can also look at it from another angle: the things that idealized buyer personas love and negative buyer personas hate are also clues on the direction of developing a product that will sell even better to the chosen group.

 

Should you remove negative buyer persona from your contact database?

 

Definitely not! Negative buyer personas are often people who are welcomed in other segments of your audience. Knowledge of their existence should rather be used for even better personalization of the messages sent. Dynamic content and A/B/X testing will help with this.

 

Before you start tidying up your database, ask yourself what else you can do to improve the experience of these groups.Focus on wisely excluding segments from your audience rather than removing them without a second thought.

 

However, if your efforts have no positive effect, consider cleaning up your CDP. If you have people there who have not shown activity in a particular channel for more than 1 year, it’s worth considering whether you want to continue burning through your budget on ads and text messages to them and ruining your reputation in the email channel.

 

Negative target group – a few words at the end

 

All the contacts in your database are important. Some of them convert, buy and build a long-term relationship with your brand. The rest provides you with valuable information, helps you learn from your mistakes and improve your product or service.

 

Negative buyer persona is a source of a lot of data that tells you what not to do. If you don’t want to burn through your marketing money and you have the tools and the willingness to learn, you’ll find them another fantastic way to optimize your spend and get more return on your investment at the same time.

 

Targeting products to the right customers will also make you build stronger relationships with them. It will further increase the likelihood that over time, your buying and paying customers will become brand advocates and your personal influencers.

 

Are you interested in giving negative target groups a try? Talk to your account manager at SALESmanago and together you can create negative buyer personas for your eCommerce.