Howard Hubler Today, I want to share with you my experience working with targeted advertising on social media. I have managed to develop a clear and detailed algorithm for basic target settings.
What is targeted advertising?
I think almost everyone reading this article already knows this definition, but just in case, I will repeat it.
Targeting is advertising on social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. Its key feature is that ads are only shown to an interested audience.
The functionality of advertising accounts allows you to precisely configure the audience for an advertising campaign.
It seems that everything is great, but, as the saying goes, there is one caveat.
High competitiveness
Internet advertising is popular, and only the lazy don’t bother with setting it up. Because of this, hundreds of new offers appear on the market every day, and most of them are of mediocre quality, so customer confidence in the service is falling.
The situation is quite sad, but it does have one advantage — once you learn how to set up targeting effectively, you will become a sought-after specialist.
This guide will help you take your first steps in this difficult business, because I have described the process of setting up an advertising campaign from scratch to the first results step by step.
Stage 1 – analytics
Analysis is the most important part of a targeting specialist’s work. Work on any project should begin with an analysis of the client’s business and its competitors.
Here is an analytical algorithm that I developed for myself and my team:
The analytical part of the work must include:
Analysis of the client’s advertising campaigns (if any).
Interview with the client:
- Who buys from them (m/f);
- Average age of the target audience;
- What customers are most interested in;
- How are they better than their competitors (price, additional offers, service, customer base, etc.);
- What process does the client go through from advertising to purchase (sales funnel);
- How are results tracked;
- Are there any metrics (if it is a website);
- What is the website’s conversion rate;
- Who works with applications (who to ask about quality in the future);
- How quickly applications are processed;
- Is there any follow-up work on customers who refuse;
- Is there a customer database (if not, can they introduce one).
Analysis of our customer compared to competitors:
- By price;
- by offer (USP);
- by packaging quality;
- compare the client’s strengths with competitors;
- where competitors advertise.
Competent work on this stage will allow you to make good basic settings, accurately target the target audience, and receive the first applications.
Stage 2 – the audience’s “pain points”
The second important point in the work of a targetologist is to understand what the target audience’s pain points are and how the product/service solves them. You need this to develop the most conversion-friendly ad possible.
Effective advertising is advertising that describes the customer’s pain points and offers a solution. The conversion rate of such advertising is an order of magnitude higher than that of a regular advertising message.
The average internet user has developed banner blindness. This means that people do not notice advertisements and anything similar to them. Therefore, advertising banners and texts should touch on something that your potential customer will not be able to ignore. If you don’t do this, it will be difficult to get the right number of clicks at a certain price. Consequently, it will be difficult to meet the customer’s expectations.
The best way to identify the audience’s pain points is to ask them directly. In addition, you need to brainstorm and interview your customer.
Stage 3 — gathering the target audience
Based on the previous two points, you should have a rough understanding of your target audience. It will be very useful to create a portrait of the target audience: who these people are, what they do, where they go, what they are interested in, and most importantly, what their pain points are.
Based on these profiles, you will develop hypotheses for collecting your target audience — think about where, how, and according to what criteria you will select the audience for displaying ads. Only after you have a clear idea can you start collecting your audience.
It is important for a targeting specialist to understand the categories of the target audience. There are four of them: related, cold, warm, and hot.
Hot customers are the customer’s immediate circle of acquaintances, as well as the customer base, retargeting, and competitors’ audience.
- Warm customers are related communities, services, websites, look-alike apps, retargeting based on activity in communities, professional groups, and closed groups on specific topics.
- Related audiences are transitional customers (birthdays, travelers, education, universities).
- Cold customers are gathered by interests and from large public groups.
Beginners often make mistakes and start advertising to cold or warm audiences, while in the early stages, only hot audiences are needed.
Stage 4 — offers and banners
Now you have a good understanding of who your potential customers are, where they are, and what concerns them. This means you can create offers and advertising banners that are as conversion-friendly as possible.
I want to share another life hack: it is better to attract your target audience with a direct appeal. That is, if your target audience is teachers and principals, write on the banner: “Are you a teacher?” “Are you a principal?” In my experience, banners without a direct appeal have a CTR of less than one, and with it — one or more.
Users first react to the image, then to its text, and read the advertising message last. This means that your text with a direct appeal should be placed on an image with a visual representation of the target audience, in our case, a photo of a teacher.
Stage 5 – Setting up and optimizing the advertising campaign
Important point: we test the banners one by one, and if one of them does not appeal to the audience, we analyze why this happened and, if necessary, correct the remaining ones.
Next, we analyze the statistics obtained for each banner:
- If one banner has performed well, we evaluate the number and cost of applications. If their cost does not exceed the client’s KPI, we double the budget for this combination (banner + target audience).
- If the banner does not produce results, we disable this combination and test the next image or combination until we find a working option on which to spend the remaining budget.
