Note: This blog was updated November 2024.
A decade ago, the best way for B2B marketers to target a specific audience was to buy space from a publisher. If Magazine X served your buyers, you’d advertise there. It was simple … and inefficient as hell.
Fortunately, digital advertising networks are here to stay. It’s now possible to reach any buyer without relying directly on media outlets. Targeting is more precise, attribution is far better, and the options never end.
But … is that always a good thing?
Digital Advertising Targeting: How Specific Should Your Audience Be?
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Hypеrspеcific Digital Targеting |
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Being able to target digital advertising has changed marketing niche products, no doubt. But there’s a downside – one that starts and end with the marketer. It’s the tendency to get too precise with digital advertising.
Demographics and Psychographics
As more information becomes available for marketers, hyper-specific targeting has become the norm. Creating demographic and psychographic profiles allow marketers to target specific audiences by their profiles. Demographics are often partitioned into race, age, gender, income, and other physical descriptors. Meanwhile Psychographic profiles focus more on interests, personalities, opinion, and taste.
These categories allow marketers to target a niche audience.
The Fundamental Principle of Digital Advertising
Before we dive deeper, there’s one important concept to cover. It’s that digital advertising is a numbers game. And the numbers aren’t always easy to look at.
The very first “banner ad,” in the Oct. 27, 1994 issue of Wired‘s digital edition, was for AT&T. It got a 44% click-through rate. In other words, about half the folks who saw this clicked on it:
Imagine paying on a cost-per-click basis for a 44% CTR. You’d better be showing your ads to the right audience. Otherwise, you’ll blow your budget in a few hours for little return.
For better or worse, digital advertising doesn’t work like that anymore.
Banner ads routinely get clicks from less than 0.2% of viewers. That’s true for direct buys, display networks and social platforms alike. Even search ads often sport CTRs of 2% or lower.
The takeaway? B2B buyers are trained to ignore advertisements; they skip right to organic content. And if you target too tight an audience, you’re not going to see campaign results.
Let’s Do the Math
Remember before where we talked about the tendency to target too precisely? Here’s where the rubber hits the road.
Let’s say you sell a software solution into companies in regulated spaces. The price tag is hefty, so you need C-level approval on the deal.
For many marketers, the tendency would be to strictly define the audience to that persona. C-level execs in FinTech, FinServ and the life sciences are the buyers. Why not go after them – and only them?
Let’s try it by building an audience in LinkedIn. (The network is the most popular tool for hyper-targeted B2B digital advertising. The data tends to be good, and the price is right.)
When we look for “CXO” titles in the right industries, we get 440,000 potential targets. Not too shabby! At a 2% CTR and a 1% conversion rate, we’d generate 88 leads. Good deal!
But there’s a catch. Your solution is used by the IT department. And check out the audience breakdown:
Oops. Nearly nine in ten of your “targets” aren’t a relevant buyer. So let’s make it more precise!
After playing whac-a-mole for a bit, we’ve created a half-decent audience. There’s some overlap, since ops plays into purchase decisions. But in general, this would hit your buyers:
See the issue?
An audience of 33,000 might yield about seven leads. And that’s assuming a 2% click-through rate, which is on the high end if they’ve never heard of you. Realistically, the number of leads to be had here is between zero and three.
You’re going to spend time honing your message. Creating ads. Building landing pages. Setting up automations. And there’s a non-zero chance you’ll get zero return. All because your targeting was too tight. Guaranteed you’re missing opportunities.
Better Digital Advertising Targeting
Let’s get out of the numbers for a second and think about the human factor. Marketing is a human discipline, after all. We’re trying to affect and influence behavior. You can’t put that on a spreadsheet.
When’s the last time you intentionally clicked an ad that was irrelevant to you? Heck, what’s the last completely irrelevant digital ad that you even remember?
This is where we can put banner blindness to work for us.
Banner blindness is the tendency for users to ignore ads. It’s why current CTRs are so much lower than legacy ones. (Though ad blockers don’t help, either.) Visitors don’t see advertisements; they’ve been trained to ignore them.
But …
Banner blindness is most acute when a message is irrelevant. And marketers can put that to use!
Remember our LinkedIn audience before? We hacked and slashed down to 33,000 people. That almost certainly excluded potential buyers. What about …
- The CEO who lists himself as primarily a business development resource?
- The CTO who doesn’t use LinkedIn?
- Or the thousands of VPs, directors and star devs who didn’t meet your “CXO” designation?
Those are all valuable targets! But in the name of digital advertising targeting, you excluded them.
You didn’t have to …
Using Banner Blindness to Your Advantage
Digital advertising CTRs are low, but they’re not zero. Someone is clicking – just not in big numbers.
That means it’s still possible to catch someone’s eye! And the best way to do it is with a relevant message.
Imagine that, instead of 33,000 on LinkedIn, we did some rudimentary targeting on the Google Display Network. You could try a lookalike audience based on your website visitors. Or some simple in-market and interest segmentation.
Will you be hitting only your best possible targets? No. Many, many people outside the C-suite at regulated companies will see you.
But here’s the beauty: They won’t really SEE you.
Banner blindness is your friend. If you make your ad hyper-specific, you’ll simply be ignored by the chaff in your audience. They’ll skip right past something that clearly isn’t for them, never really noticing it. Meanwhile, you will dramatically increase your chances of hitting all your relevant targets.
(That broad reach is essential in digital advertising. Even good targets will usually ignore you, or be running an ad blocker. You need to hit lots and lots (and lots) of them to move the needle.)
In essence, you’re using messaging to let your buyers do their own digital advertising targeting. You don’t need to define things so tightly. Instead, you can let your message and offer do the work for you. You’ll hit a higher percentage of your addressable market. And if you’re using a cost-per-click network, you won’t pay for junk impressions, anyway.
Building the Best Possible Audience
Now, there are some caveats here. You don’t want to rely on banner blindness in a CPM situation. If junk impressions aren’t free, it’s a bad idea. And you need a well-honed, well-executed message for this to fly. Go too general and you’ll blow your budget on unwanted clicks.
That said, building a broad digital advertising audience is worth a try if you operate in a B2B niche. If you’re going too tight, you’re almost certainly missing opportunities. Sure, it’s sexy to be able to target only CIOs with BMWs in Des Moines. But math is working against you. Go after a few hundred folks, and you can statistically expect zero response. Other strategies to broaden your audience include:
Leveraging Google Ads
The beauty of Google Ads is that the campaign can be as specific or broad as possible. Making sure that ads are a healthy in between enables broader audience targeting
Utilizing Facebook Custom Audiences
Another platform to use is Facebook. Facebook has a wider audience than Google Ads and often has more users on the platform. Advertising in Facebook can allow specific and broad audiences alike.
Keyword Research Targeting via LinkedIn
Compared to the previous two, LinkedIn is more hyperspecific of a platform. Using keywords being used in the industry can help target audiences within the industry. Though make sure to make engaging content to allow broadening.
Prioritizing SEO
Finally, proper use of SEO strategies both allow a broader and hyper specific audience. Ranking high on search engines increases organic traffic overall. Targeting keywords would build up a specific audience but offering great content for a wider audience allows a more diverse group.
So think outside your personas. Ignore the siren song of hyper-targeted advertising on CPC networks. Go big, and rely on your messaging to do some of the heavy lift. CTRs stink in 2024, so the bigger the haystack, the better chance it contains a needle.
FAQs
What is challenging about hyper-specific targeting?
Hyper-specific can lead to audience myopia. It can lower overall reach as only a limited audience can see the results.
What are the benefits of broad targeting over hyper-specific targeting.
Broad targeting increases your reach and exposes your campaign to a wider audience.
What should marketers use when reaching and cultivating an audience?
A mix of hyper targeting and broad targeting should be employed. Too hyper specific and your audience will get narrow and shrink. Too broad and conversion becomes low due to non-relevance.
