Using Personas to Identify Niche Targeting Ideas

In today's highly competitive ecommerce market, display ads are a valuable tool that many companies leverage to promote their brand and products. Having said that, these ads need to be targeted at the right audience segments and hence, can often pose challenges in terms of effectiveness and user engagement.

In this case study, we showcase how a fashion brand, Faye, unlocked niche targeting ideas and expanded their display ads performance cost effectively by using Delve AI's persona generation platform.

The Client

Faye is an omni-channel, small business clothing brand that provides a range of apparels and accessories for girls, whether they are toddlers or tweens. With a focus on quality and comfort, it offers fashionable, sustainable, and comfortable clothing for girls.

The company's product line includes party wear, smart casuals, and accessories, offering a wide range of choices that allows girls to express their individual style. Their clothing also reflects a blend of traditional and modern styles, catering to the diverse tastes of young girls.

The Problem

Faye, like many e-commerce brands, had been running display ads for brand marketing for over a year, targeting directly relevant audience segments such as "children's apparel", "baby & toddler apparel", and "gifts & occasions" on Google Ads platform.

These ads generated approximately 8,000 clicks each week with click-through rates (CTR) in the range of 4-5%.

The company was looking for ideas to expand their digital reach significantly and generate more revenues in a cost-effective manner. But basic understanding of their website visitors and buyers based on aggregate data from Google Analytics limited the opportunities and insights needed to expand the customer base in a budget friendly manner.

Hence, the Faye team was open to exploring options that would enable automatic segmentation and deeper understanding of their audience segments, along with identification of new ad targeting opportunities.

Solution

Faye turned to Persona by Delve AI, an AI-powered, persona generation platform that automatically analyzes first-party and public data sources to create audience segments and generates valuable customer insights.

After connecting their Google Analytics and Search Console data, Live Persona by Delve AI generated eight detailed segments and personas based on behavioral patterns, demographics, transactions, and psychographics. These segments also provided insights into the users/buyers' needs, challenges, and their digital journeys.

The team leveraged the Compare feature provided by the platform (that enables side-by-side comparison of any pair of segments across attributes such as demographics, communication preferences, brand affinities, food/news/travel/movies preferences, products and/or services likely to be purchased, values, hobbies, and tools used) to identify unique attributes specific to the converting/buyer segments as compared to the non-converting/visitor segments.

One key insight that stood out was that the users in the buyer segments (converting users) had unique hobbies such as comics and crafts in comparison to those in the other non-converting segments.

Implementation

Armed with this key insight about their customers, the company decided to target these hobbies as new audience segments for their display ads and evaluate their performance against the pre-existing audience segments.

Further, the ad creatives and the messaging were tailored based on learning from industry-specific persona attributes generated by Delve AI, thereby helping create display ads that resonated better with the respective target audiences.

Result

By targeting their ads at the newly discovered niche audience segments ("Comics & Animation fans" and "Arts & Crafts Supplies") and refining the ads based on data-driven persona insights, Faye was able to achieve 4X more reach and generate more clicks and conversions with comparable cost/CTR metrics to pre-existing audience segments.

The following is a summary of the results that Faye achieved within two months of their engagement with Delve AI platform based on the implementation of the insights derived.

• The number of impressions and clicks generated by the display ad campaigns increased by ~4X
• The incremental number of clicks generated was over 30,000 per week
• The CTR of the newly added segments (~3.9%) was comparable to the CTRs of the pre-existing segments (~4-5%)

Conclusion

By leveraging data-driven insights generated by Persona by Delve AI, Faye was able to unlock and identify niche targeting ideas and refine ads to resonate better with their target audiences. With larger reach, improved ads, and targeting in segments with lesser competition, campaign performances improved significantly.

Ad campaigns, enhanced and refined based on Delve AI generated insights such as the ones highlighted above, continue to deliver significant reach and conversion value/cost performance for Faye.

This shows that insights based on personas and customer data can be used not only to derive new marketing ideas, but also to scale up business, improve brand visibility, and deliver delightful experiences to target buyers.

"Delve AI abstracted so many finer details about our users. Knowing our desirable segment better, especially their preferences and the resources that they likely used in their path to purchase, gave us ideas to refine the experiences that we deliver, online and offline."