July 7th, 2010

The Target Audience and Audience Targeting

This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising.  It all kicks off here.

It’s worth taking another moment here to point out that a key factor in this opportunity is the very small number of people that are likely to be exposed to it.  $75 worth of AdWords and $250 worth of DirectAds is a good place to start, but it’s a very SMALL way to start.  We’re looking at getting a few 10s of thousands of impressions in the best possible case (and potentially much fewer than that).  Given likely click-through rates (we’re guessing well under 0.1%), we’re looking at driving about one hundred of potential prospects somewhere, so we need to make them count as much as possible. 

The first step for us is identifying our target audience.  This is important generally, because it allows you to start getting into the head-space of the people that you want to click through on your ads.  On Google’s AdWords, this is important because it can guide you towards which search phrases you want to place your ads next to.  On LinkedIn’s DirectAds, it will help you choose the kinds of jobs that your target is likely to be in.

So who are we targeting anyway?

Given the clients that we’ve worked with, our areas of expertise, and the cost of a full-blown engagement with Fight (though there are certainly a wide range of ways of engaging us) our target is a person in the marketing group who has control of a budget of $100,000 or more in a company with annual revenues of around $10 million or more.  Our target prospect should be considering a digital marketing project, but can be anywhere from looking to take the right first step into the space to looking for a progressive digital marketing company to help with a sophisticated online project.  They don’t have to believe in the power of a good strategy, but they do need to care about results.

If we were doing millions of impressions, then we could expect that some of the potential prospects were already in the window of opportunity for us and we would therefore have at least a few leads capable of immediate conversion (all other things being equal).  Since there will be very few people clicking through (because of the small number of impressions), we’ll have to make as much of them as possible.  Which suggests that a more appropriate approach than the “Big Ad” is a campaign that draws potential prospects into an ongoing interaction with Fight, giving us ongoing opportunities to keep our consideration high with them.

Targeting Options

With LinkedIn’s DirectAds, the targeting part is pretty straightforward: You choose the company size (in employees; we choose 201+ employees), the job function of the person that you want to show an ad to (for us, Marketing), and the seniority level of the person you want to target (Manager and Above for us). Done!

Since Google’s platform doesn’t have direct access to a lot of the information that LinkedIn has, you have few characteristics to choose from: Location (US for us), gender (not relevant to us), and age (we excluded 24 and below since those in the 0-17 bracket aren’t likely to be useful to us, and while there is some possibility in the 18-24 category, we have few enough dollars not to take the risk).  From there you can decide to advertise on Google’s search, on their network of sites using AdSense (the “Display Network”) or both.  If you don’t chose specific sites in their Network to advertise on (which we won’t, at least in the early stages), they keywords that you choose do the rest of the targeting legwork for you.