Exploitative vs empathetic marketing: How choosing the right moments can define campaign success
Real-time reactive communications, far from being intrusive, can be key to offering support to your target consumers at the moments when it is most valuable to them.
It’s 4am. She’s exhausted. Having barely closed her eyes after the last feed, the baby howls in the darkness with hunger.
She knew it would be this way, but 11 weeks in, she was hoping for some respite. As she settles for the fourth feed of the night, she looks to Google for answers to her questions: ‘settling baby into a sleep routine’, ‘ products to help baby sleep more deeply’ and ‘can essential oils help newborns sleep better?’.
In this precise moment of need, the brands reply. Are they vultures swooping, or helping hands to pick her up?
Through precision-targeting and informative creative and copy, children’s skincare brand Childs Farm is one of them, speaking to her with social content from mums like her, promoted in the darkest hours of the night. With her NCT WhatsApp group dormant for now, she welcomes the company. She’s vulnerable and wants solutions.
If the tonality is off with your messaging, you risk not just putting off the consumer in that moment, but losing them for life.
Katie Barker, Childs Farm
And this is where a deep understanding of your target consumer comes into play. Not just in knowing the exact times they need you to be there, but how they need you to show up.
In this example, Childs Farm is talking to the exhausted new parent. They’ve lost on average up to 550 hours of sleep in their baby’s first six months. They’re uncertain about every stage of the newborn journey, so the brand needs to be supportive. It shouldn’t lecture or patronise but reassure the parent and remind them they’ve got this. This isn’t about a quick-win product sell, an impulsive ‘buy’ from their basket, but about building for the long-term. It’s saying: ‘We’re with you for tomorrow’s bedtime routine, and all those to come over the baby years.’
Katie Barker, head of marketing for Childs Farm, who is leading on the #SaveOurSleep campaign, comments: “Paid media strategies can be the kill or cure of landing new product development successfully with our consumer, but being hyper-targeted isn’t enough – if the tonality is off with your messaging, you risk not just putting off the consumer in that moment, but losing them for life. As a leading baby and children’s personal care brand in the UK, it’s key that we continue standing above our competitors using innovative marketing techniques.”
Targeting the ‘bullseye’ consumer
At the outset of this campaign, re:act was already managing the brand’s always-on content, organic and paid, which allowed the agency to truly nurture the audience’s needs. Community growth of 20% in just four months – a key metric for Childs Farm – is testament to how ‘bullseye’ consumers, as re:act calls them, have converted to follow. Crucially, the audience that has been built is an engaged one, with Childs Farm netting four times the average engagement rate in the beauty sector between October and February.
The sleep campaign itself is an embodiment of targeting your bullseye right the way through the digital funnel. The announcement of a highly sought-after new product launch for parents, alongside the first proclamation of the model Vogue Williams as the brand’s ambassador, will be seeded across multiplatform reach ads, targeting more than 10 different parent audiences across the UK with multiple messaging.
This is followed up right the way down the funnel: the obsession with the bullseye continues with multiple specifically targeted podcast sponsorships, alongside gifting and paid work with advocates who over-index with them.
Tom Stone, managing partner at re:act, comments: “Our work on the new SlumberTime campaign for Childs Farm uses our tried and tested approach to campaigns, alongside exciting ‘day-parting’ (day and time paid-media targeting) and attention-grabbing creative content, all tied together with a relatable slogan to empathise with sleepless parents. They do not need war and peace at 4am, but a smart solution to their concerns, simply explained.”
Media selection aside, the often undervalued skill of targeting those in need – precisely at their time of need – is bringing the right balance of tone required in that exact moment. The broken-with-tiredness new parent wants a brand to provide them with quick solutions, yes, but a metaphorical cuddle and ‘you’ve got this’ won’t go amiss either.
Creating moments that matter for your consumer is key to generating digital penetration for your brand. For creative content that cuts through to your desired bullseye, at any point of the digital ecosystem, visit re:act.
Tom Stone is managing partner of re:act.
