Posted By
Jamie Beckland on 07/13/2010
The Web
is getting more personal. Time spent on social media sites continues to rise on
a monthly basis; personal home pages are more popular; and more and more sites
are maintaining your login on repeat visits.
All of
this poses a unique opportunity for the digital marketer in targeting the
audience. The ability to target prospects based on traditional advertising
demographics, like age, gender, education, and income is as old as advertising
itself. But targeting now extends to a whole host of new factors like behavior,
mental models, and whether you like the band!!!
Historically,
marketers knew they wanted to reach a certain segment of the population (say, college
educated women, ages 35–55). Now, this is nothing but a starting point. Want to
reach college educated women, ages 35–55, living in one of the top 30
metropolitan areas, married, with more than three kids, that wear a size 11
shoe or larger, and treat themselves at least once a week? Yes, we can do that.
This
potential wreaks havoc on the marketing planning process. What used to be a
fairly easy exercise—pull demo information for major publications—is now quite
complicated. In fact, the planning process may take as much effort as the
implementation of a campaign.
It
reminds me of the shift in corporate budgets from incremental annual increases
to zero-based budgeting. Budgets used to be justified at a percentage over the
previous year (to account for inflation). Now, your department budget likely starts
at zero, and each dollar you propose must be justified by a line item expense.
This process wrings waste out of the system.
Targeting
could work in the same way—instead of looking broadly at some rather generic
characteristics about individuals, what if you had to justify a marketing
expenditure on a person-by-person basis? Why is it worth delivering an ad
impression to User #B120769? What leads you to believe they have the potential
to become a customer?
This is
a scary proposition. Big numbers wrap us in a cocoon of safety; if the target
audience is 100 million people, we only have to get 1/10th of one
percent to convert in order to declare ourselves successful.
But, the
evidence is compelling that the hyper-targeted model is much more effective. What
if we could spend 10 times more per person, but have a pool of prospects that
is only 1% of our old pool? By my calculation, we could reach 10 times greater
revenue with the same marketing investment.
Is it
possible? Based on White Horse’s successful micro-targeting with social
seeding, I think it is. We have driven consideration and conversion through
low-volume, but high-impact outreach efforts. How are you using targeting to
focus on your most desired customers? Let me know in the comments.
Tags: Social seeding, Web promotions, social networks
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