It’s time to talk sustainability with your customers

Educating consumers about sustainability and the environment is a challenge, but for most brands it’s one that can be met through mass reach via broadcast media such as TV, and through a properly developed and funded PR strategy. However, for all but the biggest FMCG brands, such a broad-brush, mass-market approach is inefficient and expensive. For longer-tail, life-triggered purchases such as motors, property and recruitment, leveraging the available data signals to identify an audience and inform messaging is always a vital way to increase efficiency and efficacy. Within the property sector, meeting the needs of the individual consumer and understanding what motivates today’s house buyer is an essential precursor to any articulation of a developer’s ESG bonafides.  

Key to understanding consumer motivation, particularly in such a heightened and sensitive space as sustainability, is an acknowledgement that not all consumers are alike, and that their motivations cannot be understood as an homogenous, undifferentiated lump of belief sat there for a brand to engage with en masse. Everyone is motivated by different influencing factors when it comes to buying a home, and with sustainability in particular spanning both ethical and financial concerns, adopting a differentiated approach that acknowledges these diverse influencing factors is vital. But as you might imagine, curating multiple marketing campaigns, messages and advertising assets can be both timely and costly for developers; marketing in this fashion risks removing the inefficiencies of a broad-reach campaign but replacing them with an overburdened and costly production requirement. 

However, it is worth getting right: it’s been proven that personalised messaging can and does work. According to a comScore study, 86% of consumers say that personally relevant content increases their interest in a brand’s products and services. So, to engage and motivate we should target and tailor messaging accordingly. 

This is also evidenced by our Sustainability and the Homebuyer report, which found that homebuyers’ responses to the messaging they were shown varied according to their own life stage. For instance, when shown three different adverts about the benefits of sustainably built new homes, first time buyers and people on a budget of up to £200k tended to be more responsive to money saving messaging, at 43% and 50% respectively. Whereas response rates fell from those same two groups, to 32% and 34% when shown messaging relating to sustainable features. The key point here is that these were the same features: what changed was the benefits portrayed within the messaging and the comms approach taken, not the features themselves.  

So, tailoring messaging according to audience group is not only helpful but essential.  

But how do we motivate people to choose the sustainable option, or to understand the benefits of sustainable features in a way that meets their specific needs, without committing lots of resource towards it? 

This is where data-driven creative can help identify the key levers of motivation and match them with the right audiences.  

Adopting dynamic creative technology can help, allowing brands to not only to increase the volume of their creative iterations exponentially and deliver personalised messaging throughout each stage of the customer journey, from awareness to intent to purchase, all without incurring eye-watering production costs. “But how?” I hear you ask.  

Data is the key, and Space & Time’s own proprietary DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimisation) technology helps brands to identify and match the right messaging to the most appropriate audience by blending a number of data signals with a creative feed that can deliver a multitude of advert combinations. 

Our custom-built feeds combine all the data points known about the user, their environment, and the campaign to influence the creative they see. The more we know, the more personalised versions are created, making for a more bespoke experience. Our platform creates all the personalised versions of each possible execution automatically, which in turn controls production costs and allows brands to invest more of the available budget into media, delivering more reach, more engagement, and better results. The other benefit is that we can test messaging at scale, to ensure that we marry the best-performing mix of copy writing, image and calls to action, to deliver optimal performance for online display activity while delivering on the sustainable USPs. The creative reporting platform will then allow us to analyse, refine and keep evolving the campaign in order to ensure adverts are always as relevant as possible. 

So, why wouldn’t you want to use Dynamic Creative to help understand consumer motivations and tailor your digital marketing strategy? Let our specialist Tech and Creative experts work with you towards putting your customers (as well as the environment) at the heart of your growth marketing strategy, by providing them with a clearer route to make informed lifestyle and purchase decisions. By doing this you can drive growth for your business, value for your customer and, as a combined effort, build towards our sustainable future.