The Value of Precision Targeting

We live in an era of disruption in which innovation and technology have transformed the way we live and work at an unprecedented rate. In order to remain relevant, marketers need to leverage emerging technologies to meet changing consumer behaviours, improve engagement, and achieve data-driven impact. One of these technologies is precision targeting. L’Oréal Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Research at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Andrew Stephen, explains how a brand can use precision targeting to navigate social media algorithms effectively and deliver its message to the right audience.

Transcript

The purpose of precision targeting is to get the right content seen by the right people. You want to get your content messages, ads, and so on in front of the right people, those likely to want to engage with it, and hopefully, who are the most likely to purchase or do something else that’s commercially valuable to your business in response to that advertisement. This is why precision targeting is important.

So let’s use the analogy of a dartboard – placing ads on a social media site with two and a half million users is likely to be as accurate as playing darts blindfolded. Where your ads end up and who they’re seen by is really going to be out of your control, determined by algorithms, and is not very likely to reach the audiences who would be interested in your ad.

Now consider the data available on consumers, such as age, location, gender, relationship, languages, education, work, their hobbies, and interests, and so on, and so on, and so on. The opportunity that precision targeting presents, being able to target audiences who would find your ads most appealing and relevant, therefore can be built off this technology that, that knows something about people. Targeting can therefore be really broad, as something like potential customers who live in a certain country or state. Or, if you desire, you can get as specific as potential customers who live in a certain country, currently university students, have shown interest in your brand on another platform, and so on. So let’s have an example. Consider the potential that this all presents for a company that offers live acoustic bands for weddings.

So, using precision targeting, what would this company be able to do? Well, they’d be able to narrow down potential consumers who live in the city – where they’re based – who currently identify as being in a relationship on social media, uh, and who have liked or followed groups associated with that type of music, so live acoustic music. And so that when someone’s relationship status changes to engaged, that’s the trigger. Um, they could use precision targeting to really show a targeted advertisement at people who are therefore most likely to want the services offered by this company. So they can really get on the radar of the consumer who’s planning a wedding. 

The only thing to be mindful of with precision targeting though, is it can get too far. So you can, you can go too far and veer into what I call creepy territory, where you’re even risking the perception that you’re invading the privacy of potential customers. So the best practice is to narrow down your targeting, but not to be so narrow that it could feel invasive or creepy in any way that feels like a breach of privacy. The other practical reason for not going too narrow is, at the end of the day, you do need some volume in your business. So, so narrowing it down to target just one person is probably, most of the time, not going to be enough customers to sustain the business. So you do need some mass reach in there, but it doesn’t have to be the whole universe.

I hope these visual analogies made the concepts of precision targeting and programmatic advertising more real and relatable.