How to do targeted advertising for your business

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How to Select your Target

One of the main questions in advertising is: who? Who do you sell to, who do you persuade, who is the key influence, who actually purchases, who makes the key decisions, who is most important to you, who - in short - is your audience?

Advertising costs money. Often the sums are considerable and rarely does the money come easy to the advertiser. That money should be spent properly, which means it should be spent accurately. A failure of efficiency is a waste of the budget. And efficiency means directing the right messages in the right way at the right people. Advertising equals communication. It is vital for effective communication to address the correct audience - the one that matters.

Targeting lies at the heart of the communications process. Right at the very beginning of the process the advertiser must decide who to talk to, who to select as the audience for the message.

Sometimes this is simple. An advertisement for a cook for a school canteen would begin by finding people with suitable experience - those who are or have been cooks in an industrial, educational or health-care kitchen. It is an obvious starting point. An advertisement for dental chairs would aim at dentists (though maybe not only dentists. Targeting gets more complex quite rapidly).

An announcement about pension increases would go to the elderly. A new Civic Centre in Wolverhampton would be announced to the people of Wolverhampton.

Advertising a new high-performance motorbike would no doubt aim at people interested in, possessing, or currently using a motorbike.

But targeting is not always as simple as that.

Who do you select as the target for a new Mini car? The young? Those with less money? Those who want a second car? Mums? Who would be the target for sherry advertising? The elderly?

Confirmed drinkers? Up-market households? Or new drinkers? And who do you advertise to for office copiers? Think of the possibilities. Targets might include:

- secretaries

- department heads

- purchasing managers

- managing directors

- all middle managers in a firm.

The answer is a matter of judgement. Get it right and the campaign will strike home. Get it wrong, and the money is wasted, the opportunity is wasted, the time is wasted.

It is, commonsense dictates, vital to get the target right. Sometimes this is an easy matter, and sometimes the target is difficult to determine - sometimes, indeed, almost impossible to determine. This is what makes advertising an art as well as a science.

WHO IS THE TARGET?

Different campaigns have different targets. Ethical pharmaceuticals, machine tools, agricultural fertilisers, swimwear, Heineken lager and the local bingo hall all have different, varying and specific target audiences. What is common is the need to make audience selection precise. That is the vital aspect of communications planning: the concept of precision.

The more precise the targeting, the more effective the message will be, and the less wasteful the campaign. Planning aims to become more and more precise: not all people but these people, not all house-owners but a type of house-owner, not all holiday-makers but a type of holiday-maker, not all motorists but a type of motorist.

Few products sell to universal audiences and are all things to all people. Most products have their own profile, their own particular type of customer, their own segment of the market, their own special character.

Indeed, the trend in marketing over the past decade has been to encourage this: to divide markets up and produce highly specific entries for specific segments. The trend, in short, has been towards ‘niche marketing’.

You do not sell to everyone, but to your particular market. Separate it out. Consider the motorcar market again. It actually is at one and the same time a wide variety of dissimilar subsections: Rolls-Royce, Minis, estate cars, Land Rovers, sports cars, middlesized cars for salespeople, two-seater cars and eight-seater ‘People Movers’. Not a market, but markets.

To make matters worse, markets change and move. Types of customer will alter over time. Holidays in Florida were rare, they then became up-market, but more frequent, and have now become mass-market. Targets change. Advertisers must keep ahead of such change.

So, who indeed is the target? This will depend on whether the situation is commercial or non-commercial. In a commercial campaign, in order to achieve a sale the advertiser will have to consider three forces which may lead towards the sale:

1. Who uses the product?

2. Who actually purchases it?

3. Who decides to obtain it?

These are the classic three partners in the buying process: users, purchasers and decision makers. But there may also be a fourth one - influencers! Taking the model of the office copier mentioned earlier:

- the secretary may use it

- the purchasing manager may issue the purchase order

- the Chief Executive or the senior directors may make the decision.

But around them may swarm nearly everyone in the organisation, all interested in, or with a view about, or making occasional use of, the office copying machines. They are influencers. They cannot help it.

Who are these users, purchasers and decision makers, in practice? That is, can they be identified, or specified? Or named? Central to the targeting decision is the question of defining the target audience. That is, defining:

- who it should be

- where and who they are.