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Why being relevant can make or break your digital marketing efforts?

What is relevancy and why does it matter in marketing?

Miksi digimarkkinointisi onnistuminen on kiinni sen relevanssista?

Every single interaction between your business and your target audience is important. How you should engage with them depends on the stage and circumstance they are in. Consider this: if a complete stranger proposed to you, would you say yes? Probably not. It’s the same with marketing your business (doesn’t apply to all products or services though). Being relevant is simply knowing what to say, when to say it and how to say it.

Here are a few pointers that will (probably) grab your attention on why relevancy matters in marketing:

  • minus 68% cost per lead
  • 175% more conversions within 2 weeks
  • minus 75% cost per conversion
  • 250% increase in ROAS

Each data point is taken from a different campaign. So it’s not based on a one-off success story. When you put time, attention and effort into relevancy, you can get the most out of every penny you spend on digital marketing. So what exactly is relevancy? Why is it important? How can you measure it? How can you tweak it?

In this two-part blog series I’ll guide you through two paid channels (Google Ads and Facebook Ads) and provide some actionable tips but first I’ll go through a framework to help you demystify relevancy.

What is relevancy and why does it matter?

Let’s start with the first two questions: what exactly is relevancy and why is it important?

Here’s how Lexico’s dictionary describes the word relevant:

“Appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.”

Now let’s read the first part again and break it down: “Appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances”. Notice how relevancy goes hand-in-hand with time. That stranger who proposed to you could increase their chance of getting a yes as an answer by timing the question right. Timing is crucial. Conveying the right message, experience, or offer to customers in exactly the right context is a key component to effective marketing.

According to recent consumer research, people tend to prefer brands that are relevant to their needs in the moment. Another consumer research further indicates the importance of relevance: in the U.S. market alone, companies lose $1 trillion in annual revenues to competitors due to not being consistently relevant enough.

Think of Netflix for a moment. Why is it so addictive? One of the reasons is because it’s filled with great content. Great content is subjective. However, digitalization has enabled companies to offer tailored services to a large mass through user data analysis. Netflix is changing the TV industry by creating compelling original programming, analyzing its user data to serve subscribers better, and above all by letting people consume content in the ways they prefer. Their content recommendation algorithm has gotten so good (meaning relevant) that on average their subscribers spend 1 hour and 11 minutes each day watching Netflix. With over 117 million subscribers, that translates into a whopping 140 million hours of content on average per day!

I hope I’ve convinced you of why relevance matters. I won’t go into how you can improve your product or service to become more relevant. There are frameworks for that (problem/solution fit and market/product fit).