Adding Creativity to Audience Targeting
It has become a modern urban legend: “The Pair of Shoes That Stalked Me Around The Web.” These tall tales emerge from the ability to target consumers with specific and typically uninteresting messaging. But it’s possible to create targeted work that is non-invasive to consumers and even, dare I say, enjoyable for creative agencies to make.
Below, I’ve listed guidelines that describe how to create targeted messaging, be in in banners or digital film, that are actually creative.
Establish The Target
Work with partner agencies and brand planners to align on a common target for your communications. Better yet, create a communications framework that identifies the phases of the consumer journey, target mindsets, and the role of comms.
Establish The Work
To truly orchestrate an integrated campaign, a singular creative idea must unify all the creative. Establish your campaign’s big idea, the objective of the campaign, and the role of each channel first.
Keep Your Audience Broad
Maybe this is the most surprising to you, but because marketing theory has proven that broad audiences best drive business effects, it is important to keep audiences broad. (Bryon Sharp and other) A creative media messaging matrix may include 1 or 5 or 50 segments. But each of those audiences should only be defined by the most basic demographic and, if needed, 1 or 2 additional qualifiers (such as broad behavior, location, or weather). More qualifiers creates increasing inefficiencies in media buying and creative development.
Keep Your Targeting Relevant To The Consumer’s Experience
It’s recommended that targeting qualifier is associated with how your target interacts with your brand. Irrelevant qualifiers are not likely to benefit the creative work or media buying process. (Remember: just because you can target “Male Pet Owners Who Recently Bought A House And Are Browsing Their Facebook Newsfeed In The Morning,” doesn’t mean you should!) This is another place where having a comms framework is beneficial in understanding the right moments in which to reach your audience.
Learn As Much As You Can About Your Audience
Tools like Facebook’s Ad Manager, allow you to explore different audience types, like the ones listed out here. Another tool, Facebook IQ gets you deeper into targeting insights. With Facebook IQ, you can dig into your brand’s Facebook audience or general audience demographics to discover habits and interests.
Make It Simple To Execute And Implement
Once you have all this rich consumer insight, it still needs to be communicated to other members of your team. Messaging matrixes (like this Google Spreadsheet) are an effective way to align with creative teams and agency partners.
Finally, we work with clients and media agencies to ensure that the work is launched at the right time, with the appropriate audiences. Once the campaign is live, we can review in real time which creative is most effective, both in terms of ad spend and communications objective. And we can report back to concretely demonstrate how the creative advertising targeting really worked.
