Do you often wonder how quickly time flies? We live in a hectic and busy lifestyle and often we realize that time has passed too quickly than our expectations. We see kids growing into teens and teens into youngsters’ right in front of our eyes. We feel this because we are seeing time as one giant factor that encompasses everything that we have said done and felt in the past. However, when we begin to break time into seasons and months, we begin to realize how each moment turned up and how we reacted to it and what it ultimately led to. In digital marketing, we often think of customers who are always online throughout the day, but we never break up time on a daily basis and understand what consumers would be doing and their intent at certain hours of the day. With dayparting, marketers can understand the need and context-based patterns without any extra cost.
Device Usage Pattern
Every user has its own lifestyle and daily routine, but there are certain usage patterns that stay same and can help digital marketers to understand which devices users would be using in certain hours of the day. To begin with, most users start their day with their mobile devices and therefore most users are hooked on to their smartphones and tablets at the start of the day, but as they reach their offices and workstation, mobile devices are replaced with laptops and computers. By late afternoon, users again switch to mobile devices as they have their lunches and commute back home. During the weekend, mobile search dominates the graph because most users search through their mobile devices. Segmentation of how consumers use different devices during different hours of the day can help marketers to engage their target audience in a better way.
Product Search Pattern
Dayparting also includes product search that helps in understanding the intent of the customers to market products and services effortlessly. Every product has a different target audience and therefore it is important to find out the daily device pattern for your product category. For instance, if you’re marketing for a coffee shop it would be ideal to reach out to the customers during the morning and late afternoon hours when consumers are willing for a caffeine kick. Similarly, restaurants should look out for customers’ right before the meal hours. Brands targeting working parents should reach out their target audience during late evening hours because that is the best time when working couples are at home. Online retailers should focus reaching out their target consumers right after meals and before bedtime. Segmentation of consumers based on the product search pattern can ensure that your consumers listen to what you’re trying to communicate.
Understanding the Intent Pattern
Different customers have different requirements and queries and dayparting strategies can help you to improve your customer conversion rate by actually looking into the intent of the customers and how they correlate to different customer values for your business. You can have deeper insights into why certain customers have certain queries and requirements at certain hours of the day and you can optimize your business by helping those customers and making them feel that you really care for your customers thereby improving the conversion ratio.
Developing Dayparting Strategies
Dayparting can become an integral part of your marketing strategy to help with customer conversion, but there are certain things to consider when you are developing these strategies.
Mobile Search
Marketers normally assume that consumers use a mobile device when they are not home or when they are on the move. This is partially incorrect because most smartphone users look at their phones the moment they wake up.
When you are planning a dayparting strategy make sure your site is mobile-ready or else the campaign impact will be limited.
Offline Hours
– While we assume that customers are always online, there are certain hours when customers are busy having a break, picking up groceries and busy with rush hour routine. This is probably not the right time because the customers might not think of your business during such hours.
Stay Unique
– Understanding and copying other company’s dayparting strategy sounds like an easy way out, but it is recommended not to do that because your customer base is unique and you need a unique approach to dayparting. It is important to realize that not all categories are sensitive to timing. On the other hand, consumers use different devices for different things at different hours of the day, so consider that when developing your dayparting strategy.
Informational Ads
– If you are keen on pushing ads, you must realize that the screen space on the mobile device is relatively less and therefore consumers might not really notice it as compared to desktop ads. To make it work, mobile ads should be informational that can quickly attract consumer’s attention.
Optimize Your Social Messages
– Use various social media tools like Buffer and SocialFlow that would allow you to optimize your social messages according to the timeline of your audience to ensure they are paying attention.
At StratAgile, we understand the importance of dayparting and therefore do content experiments to test which version of a particular page leads to better conversion rate. Content experiment allows us to compare how different pages perform on random users based on different objectives. Using content experiments different models and approaches can be tested using different URL to ensure optimum conversion and website performance.