CHAPTER 2

Way Beyond “Women 25 to 54”

Define Your Target Audience Better Than Ever

I was talking with friends at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2009 about a concept I call hypertargeting, by which a company gears a marketing and advertising effort toward a specific group through individuals’ social media profiles, activities, and networks. At the time, and even more so now, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn held an unbelievable amount of data on hundreds of millions of people. From users’ profiles and comments, you could advertise and market toward groups more efficiently than ever before. On Facebook alone, you could target people based on their age, gender, education, marital status, interests, job title, and employer.

For example, instead of a beer company randomly searching for men aged 21 to 23, the company could easily find 21- to 23-year-old males in key geographic markets who have listed “drinking,” “partying,” or “bars” as interests on their profiles. My friend Leslie Bradshaw overheard the conversation on hypertargeting and chimed in with her thoughts on what she called nanotargeting—a concept similar to hypertargeting but with search criteria so narrow that you can target just one individual among hundreds of millions.

“Cool,” I thought. I raced back to my hotel room that night, jumped onto the Facebook ad platform, played around with targeting options, and took out an ad for 31-year-old, married, female employees of Likeable Media living in New York City. The ad copy read, “I love you and miss you Carrie. Be home from Texas soon.”

That advertisement had a target audience of one (Figure 2.1). One person, out of hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, could see it. Of course, when my wife and business partner, Carrie, saw the ad, she immediately loved it, freaked out, and did what any social media marketing firm partner would do. She took out a Facebook ad targeting 31-year-old, married, male employees of Likeable Media living in New York: “Thanks, Dave. Love you too. This is pretty cool.” We’ve been sending one another nanotargeted Facebook ads ever since.

FIGURE 2.1 Nanotargeted Ad

Unless you just want to impress your spouse or friend, or you’re a social media dork like this author, you probably don’t have a target audience of one. Then again, maybe you do: would your brand benefit from engaging with the CEO of the largest company in town? Would your startup benefit from engaging with a partner in your city’s more prestigious venture capital firm? Consider the possibilities of nanotargeting the marketing director of a key vendor or partner to further explore his or her current needs and overall expectations.

Whether your perfect target audience is 1, 10, 100, 1,000, or 1 million people, you can now engage them in a way that was virtually impossible only a few years ago. Once you find your target audience, listen to them (see Chapter 1), find out what they are looking for, and provide your product or service to meet their needs. You can build a relationship with your audience and even allow them to directly buy your goods or services, all using social media.

In the past, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio allowed marketers to tap into wide audiences of people, based on broad demographic criteria: 18- to 34-year-olds, 25- to 54-year-old females, or males 55 and older in New York, for example. But in hindsight, in almost every case, these categories were too sweeping. Specifics will help you hone in on your target audience, connecting you directly with the consumer. For instance, are you targeting parents or singles? Sports fans? Hockey fans only? Are you in every major market or only certain markets?

Traditional marketers may be naysayers here with regard to the advent of social media and its relation to reaching the right customers. They will argue that currently with cable TV networks, you can target people with specific interests, such as home decorating or cooking. They might believe that trade publications and conferences are the best way to find your niche audience in the business-to-business (B2B) space.

While clearly you can target your audience better using niche trade publications and cable television shows than you previously could with just network television or radio, magazines and specialized publications are quickly perishing. Also, everyone I know fast-forwards through TV commercials using DVR technology, no matter what specialized network they’re watching. With the introduction of commercial-free, audience-targeted podcasts, music and news blogs, and online user-friendly music listening sites, such as Spotify and Pandora, fewer and fewer people are tuning into traditional radio broadcasts. Besides, just because targeting through traditional media is better than it used to be doesn’t mean it is the best. And why settle for anything but the best in your search for the perfect audience for your product or service? Let’s take a look at a few examples of how to find this ideal audience on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

FACEBOOK: REACH AS MANY USERS AS YOU WANT (OR AS FEW!)

In the movie The Social Network, the Sean Parker character played by Justin Timberlake has a famous line: “You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars.” My line on Facebook marketing is the opposite: “You know what’s cooler than reaching a billion people on Facebook? Reaching the perfect 1,000 prospects or 100 or 1.” Facebook’s ads aren’t free to run, of course. Facebook earned more than $3 billion in ad revenue in the third quarter of 2014¹ but its self-serve ad platform is free to explore. (We’ll talk a lot more about Facebook ads in Chapter 15.) This means that anyone who wants to can easily research exactly how many people on Facebook fit into whatever targeting criteria he or she desires, free of charge. In other words, without even running any ads, you can find your target population among hundreds of millions of people simply by feeding Facebook the exact attributes you’re looking for in an audience.

I’ve included a screenshot (Figure 2.2) of various targeting criteria available to advertisers. The basics—gender, age, and location—allow you to quickly target millions of people at scale the way you would using traditional media. (And before you tell me Facebook is solely for young people, note that in the United States alone, there are more than 50 million users over age 60.)

FIGURE 2.2 Basic Targeting Criteria

So, even though it’s very general, if you’re looking for your audience based only on age, gender, or location, you can certainly find it easily. It’s the other categories, however, that allow you to drill deep down to identify your perfect audience. Let’s focus on the two key targeting categories in this process: interests and workplace (see Figure 2.3).

FIGURE 2.3 Targeting by Interests and Workplace

In the “Interests” category, you can input literally any interest that at least 100 people have listed on their profile. Note: there are hundreds of thousands of options here. Type in “cooking,” for instance, then more specifically “Italian cooking,” “Chinese cooking,” or “French cooking.” You could also go with “baking,” then “baking pies” or “baking cakes.” There are of course many possibilities and dozens of other cooking-related keywords. If you work in the food industry, these keywords are powerful search criteria in helping you find your target audience. The cooking-related words you decide to pick will depend on whether your products are meant for Italian cooking or Chinese cooking or baking.

If you’re a yoga center, consider targeting people nearby who list “yoga” as an interest. Perhaps you’d like to be more specific and target people who list “Bikram yoga” or “Reiki,” depending on the services you offer or are researching offering in the future. If you represent a nonprofit, consider targeting the thousands of people who list “philanthropy” as an interest. Then take it a step further, and check for specific causes that are relevant or reach out to other nonprofit workers who share a similar mission, locally or even globally.

In the “More Demographics” section, you can also select a job title. Perhaps you want to target retail buyers, distributors, HR managers, journalists, doctors, dentists, or maybe CEOs. This search function is especially helpful in the B2B space.

Remember, even in the B2B space, you’re not marketing to businesses. You’re marketing to people, who happen to be decision makers for businesses—this is an important distinction. There’s no such thing online as B2B. It’s all P2P, or person to person. We’ve grown our B2B businesses at Likeable Media and Likeable Local significantly by targeting brand managers, CMOs, and marketing directors (Likeable Media) and dentists, real estate agents, doctors, jewelers, and other small business owners (Likeable Local). For example, when Likeable Media wanted to land an account with Neutrogena, we targeted marketing directors and managers at their company using Facebook ads. After we got their attention, they called us and became clients within a month.

In the “Work” category, you can input any workplace that people on Facebook have identified as their employer. This function can actually be a helpful guide for local businesses that are geographically close to similar, larger companies. We had a chiropractor client in San Francisco, for instance, who targets employees of nearby offices. You can also use this function for internal marketing and communications. Imagine telling the whole staff, “You’re doing a great job, keep up the good work,” just by sending out a Facebook message. Get creative with this function, and you’ll figure out how to best utilize it for your organization.

When you combine the “Job Title” category with “Work,” as well as other specifications like “Industry” or “Office Type,” then you can pinpoint your key audience with precision. Imagine, for instance, searching for only CIOs at Fortune 500 companies in the medical industry, or targeting real estate agents at the top five firms in town.

Whether you’re a small business, huge brand, nonprofit, or government agency, your perfect target audience will be found on Facebook. Frankly, I’ve yet to find an organization anywhere whose target audience isn’t on Facebook. Be sure to listen, and then find and engage your share of the hundreds of millions of people across the world who communicate via Facebook—the share that makes sense for your organization.

LINKEDIN: FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT, TARGET PROFESSIONALS ONLY

While Facebook may boast 1.23 billion monthly users, LinkedIn boasts over 300 million professionals and business users. If you’re in the business-to-business space, it’s well worth looking at specific targeting options on LinkedIn. Such information provided includes the obvious, again—age, gender, and location—but LinkedIn also utilizes criteria that allow you to determine exactly who your audience should be, based on job title, school or degree, skills, group affiliations, industry, seniority, and company size.

Software marketers might target information technology professionals. Financial planners might target C-level senior management in markets where the financial planners have offices. We use LinkedIn to target senior marketing professionals in New York, Boston, and Chicago. Also, the reality is that there are still some professionals, especially senior ones, who aren’t on Facebook, and if you’re going to find these folks at all online, LinkedIn is a great place to start.

FORGET DEMOGRAPHICS: TARGETING ON TWITTER

We’ve been talking about the amazing demographic targeting capabilities of Facebook and LinkedIn’s ad platforms. But what about targeting people based on actual needs they have expressly shared? In other words, who cares about people’s age or their job title or interests if you know that they are looking for a service or product you provide? You can find such people using Google, but the current leading platform for finding conversation is Twitter. All tweets are, by default, public. There is an immensely high volume of tweets every day—more than 500 million!² By utilizing Twitter, your target audience becomes based on what people are actually saying, not simply on what you glean from demographic research.

Say, for instance, you’re an entertainment lawyer, or you’re in the marketing department for an entertainment law firm. You can target movie producers or actors or others you think might need your services. Or you can do a Twitter search, such as the one featured in Figure 2.4. In this example, a search for the keywords “need entertainment lawyer” yields three people who in the last 18 hours actually asked for an entertainment lawyer!

FIGURE 2.4 Entertainment Law Firm Twitter Search

How much potential revenue would three inbound leads mean to most law firms?

If you haven’t done one before, take a moment to try a Twitter search on your smartphone. Just go to Search.Twitter.com, and type in the search bar “need [your product, service, or category]” or “I want [something you have].” You may be happily surprised with how large a perfect target audience you find out there practically begging for you. This method of targeting is not going to scale for low-priced, high-frequency products, but for anyone selling or marketing a high-end product or service (jewelry, real estate, or financial or other professional services, to name a few), it’s the ultimate in targeting. Imagine communicating only with the people who want to hear from you or who are sharing problems you can solve. The time spent targeting on Twitter will quickly pay off. Stop guessing what your audience wants and start searching—and listen to what they are saying.

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?

The last few decades have brought numerous improvements in marketing intelligence and research. But until you had today’s ability to target such specific groups of people, you may have had no need to identify your target audience so narrowly. For example, you might have known your audience loved playing sports, but perhaps they preferred one sport to another. Or maybe young women loved your product, but you didn’t know that 21- to 22-year-olds were far more likely to buy it than 23- to 24-year-olds. Today you can run the appropriate Facebook or Twitter searches to target your audience precisely and find out who the consumers for your products and services actually are.

While some businesses have narrower and more well-defined target audiences than others, you can always refine the notion of who is part of your ideal audience. You will likely find that there is more than just one group of people who are looking for your goods or services. Huge global brands, for example, have certain categories of customers that are more common than others. Perhaps female lawyers spend more on your product than stay-at-home moms, for instance. If you don’t know the specifics, you can always ask too: If you have 1,000 Facebook fans, ask what their favorite sport is. If you find out for some reason that 9 out of 10 of them prefer baseball, you might consider sponsoring a local Little League team. Social media will help you find your target audience and provide you with further insight about these groups.

Put an End to Wasteful Marketing Spending

There’s a common axiom about advertising among key marketing executives: “Fifty percent of my advertising works. I just don’t know which 50 percent.”

Search marketing and social media have rendered it possible to target exactly the people you know are your customers and best prospects, not the people you think are in those groups based on your intuition and vague understanding of market research. You can continue to spend your marketing and advertising dollars on less targeted media in the name of greater reach and awareness, or you can focus on a narrower but much more potent audience. When you tap into that unique target audience, you’ll never again want to waste precious marketing dollars on less accountable, out-of-focus media.

Targeting Is Just the Beginning of the Conversation

Remember, we’re not talking about advertising repeatedly in the hopes of eventually finding the right person at the right time who may happen to need to buy your product or service. We’re talking about defining and finding the narrowly targeted, correct audience and then beginning to engage them in a conversation, so that when they are ready to buy, you’re the obvious, logical choice. If you’ve targeted them correctly and then engaged with them along the way, when it comes time to buy, they won’t even need to search, and they certainly won’t need to respond to a television or radio ad. They’ll already know you, trust you, and like you, so they’ll turn right to you. And of course, you don’t need to be peddling a physical product. Take, for example, Likeable’s work with the Fibromyalgia & Fatigue Centers (FFC) and the steps we took in helping people afflicted with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and the FFC connect.

Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Centers Target Just the People in Need

Millions of Americans suffer from fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. The Fibromyalgia & Fatigue Centers of America is one of the leading treatment facilities in the country. They provide help in the form of doctors, nurses, counselors, and group support with 12 physical locations throughout the country. The typical broad profile of someone who suffers from one of these illnesses is a female between the ages of 35 and 60, and in the past, FFC has used mass targeting initiatives in the form of television ads, radio commercials, and print ads in the hope of reaching these and other people who can benefit from their services.

That kind of advertising is expensive and wasteful, however, so we developed a narrower targeting initiative. We used Facebook to target people who actually listed “fibromyalgia” in their profiles as an interest because we assumed that, aside from a few doctors and researchers, most people who list it as an interest suffer from the illness or have a close family member who does. We also listened on Twitter for people actually talking about one of the illnesses, regularly searching for keywords such as “fibromyalgia,” “tired all of the time,” “chronic fatigue,” and “why am I so tired?”

Equally important, we set up a community on Facebook called Fibro 360, where anyone who has been affected by fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome can share stories, support one another, and get news, tips, research, and information on the illnesses. We didn’t link online ads and marketing messages to FFC’s website or to its phone number. Instead, we linked all communications to the community on Facebook. Nine months later, the results were astounding: tens of thousands of people had joined the community on Facebook.

Now hundreds of people connect and talk with one another each and every day, and if and when people in the community want additional help, they turn to Fibromyalgia & Fatigue Centers and often hire our client. Hundreds have done this, resulting in a greater than 20 percent sales lift, attributed to Facebook.

LIKEABLE’S OWN TARGETING

The best B2B targeting we’ve done using social media is for our own companies, Likeable Media and Likeable Local. We may be smaller than lots of big agencies, but with more than 39,000 likes on Facebook, we’ve grown one of the largest fan bases of any marketing agency in the world. More important than the number of fans we have, though, is who they are. From the start, we’ve targeted people on Facebook with job titles such as “chief marketing officer,” “vice president of marketing,” “brand manager,” and “marketing director.” These key decision makers are our perfect customers, so we’ve focused our efforts on them and geared our ads toward them. They’ve become fans, they’ve interacted with us over time, and many of them have called or e-mailed asking to do business with us. For Likeable Local, we’ve targeted and acquired over 10,000 small business fans on our Facebook page.

No matter whom your organization is looking to reach, you can find them on Facebook, and, increasingly, on Twitter. There are several more examples in Table 2.1 of types of companies and the narrow audience targeted for them using both social media sites.

TABLE 2.1 Targeted Audience for Various Companies

So, who are your perfect customers? How narrowly can you define your target audience?

HASTE MAKES WASTE; SO DOES TRADITIONAL MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

I understand that after reading this chapter, you won’t go out and immediately cut your entire advertising budget because you’re targeting too wide an audience. You don’t have to. But surely you can think of somewhere to cut back in order to start targeting the right people through social networks, those who will become your customers, advocates even, in the future. Find them, bring them into the conversation, and when they’re ready, you’ll be their first choice.