By Derek P. Vlcko, September 12, 2021
If you are a skeptic of marketing jargon, I can’t blame you. The field is littered with an alphabet soup of acronyms, and there always seems to be “that one everyone is talking about.” However, a fundamental marketing concept has stood the test of time and is more important than ever in today’s digital world. We’re talking about targeting. But before talking about its application in the digital space, we will first define targeting and then turn back the clock to understand its roots.
Targeting is the practice of focusing a marketing activity (messaging, product, campaign, etc.) towards a defined customer segment. Customer segments are subgroups of an overall customer base that share demographic, behavioral, or attitudinal attributes. Think of a bag of M&Ms as your customer base, and segments are when you organize the M&Ms by color. You can create a marketing activity that appeals specifically to green and blue M&M segments by applying targeting.
“Think of a bag of M&Ms as your customer base and segments are when you organize the M&Ms by color. By applying targeting, you can create a marketing activity that appeals specifically to green and blue M&M segments.”
To understand the origins of targeting, let’s go back to the 10th-4th centuries B.C. to the ancient Greek marketplace, Agora. Here at Agora, shopkeepers used the earliest forms of targeting – geographic and affinity-based. Geographic targeting is pretty much what it sounds like, targeting consumers based on location. These local shops were similar to many brick-and-mortar stores that target consumers that live within a certain radius of their shop. The other form, affinity-based, targets consumers based on their preferences for certain types of products. Signage was often used to express the specific affinity. A sign featuring a fish is intended to attract people with an affinity for seafood. Many businesses today utilize both geographic targeting and affinity-based signage to attract customers.
It was not until the late 1600s that newspapers began to appear in England and the United States. Newspapers introduced an entirely new way of targeting consumers through advertising. The first newspaper ad appeared in the Boston News-Letter in May 1704, advertising a plantation on Oyster Bay, Long Island. In this example, the property seller utilized the newspaper to expand geographic targeting (reach). The advertising mediums expanded to radio in 1922, television in 1941, and eventually the internet in 1994.
Internet marketing was no different from traditional print, T.V., and radio advertising in its early stages. You picked a high-traffic property you thought might be a good fit with your offering, wrote a check, and hoped it would translate into revenue. Data on detailed demographics, behaviors, and affinity segments did not yet exist. Of course, much has changed since 1994, and we now have more platforms and data than we know what to do with. Now that data does exist, how do we utilize it to maximize campaign ROI?
Pick the Right Platforms
Determining which platform is the best match for your audience is the first and most critical step for effective targeting. Its like setting the GPS coordinates on a cross-ocean expedition. If you start your journey with the wrong coordinates, it pretty much invalidates all of the following decisions unless the coordinates are reprogrammed. There are over 40 social platforms to chose from and it can be overwhelming. See my thoughts on which social platforms are likely to provide the best results. You will be relieved to find that one to three should be sufficient for most small businesses.
Segment Your Audience
Audiences are rarely a monolithic group. Back to the M&M analogy, it would be impossible to receive a bag of M&Ms containing a single color. Audiences are much the same, where they are made up of various attitudes, behaviors, affinities, and demographics. Segmentation involves clustering groups of audience members with similar attributes into groups. These groups can be named for an identity that can be easily recalled and visualized.
An example is “Aspiring Digirati,” used to describe an audience cluster of young and enthusiastic digital marketing professionals working towards mastery in their field. Segmentation exercises can be constructed as a hypothesis, based on the first-hand experience of working directly with your customer base, as the output of detailed audience data analysis, or both. Either way, segmentation should develop strategies to engage and grow the largest and most valuable audience segments to your business. For example, if a segment requires a significant investment of resources to engage with but ends up providing very little revenue to the business, you will be better served to focus your energy on segments with greater revenue potential.
Target the Most Valuable Segments
Now that you’ve identified the most valuable audience segments, it’s time to execute. Execution involves targeting. Targeting is just what it sounds like – putting your marketing communications “on target.” To accomplish this, combine the work completed on platform selection and segmentation. Bring these together to 1) deliver the right message, 2) through the right channel, 3) to the right audience, 3) at the right time- easy to say and difficult to do. Many of the top social platforms provide tools for detailed audience targeting, and some even use machine learning to self-optimize over time. Either way, you can receive a data feedback loop that can provide valuable insights to adjust targeting strategies. A/B experiments are a way to test different hypotheses and determine which works best. The chances are that you are here reading this Blog because I targeted you through either Google or Facebook (we’ll talk about search targeting another day.)
Effective platform selection, segmentation, and targeting are vital to ensure marketing investments are landing “on target. Otherwise, your hard-earned investments may end up lost in the ether.