You may be scoffing at the headline. Too targeted an audience? How can anyone be too targeted? Surely you want to target those who you know are keen on your product.
While yes, brands do want to find and target those who will spend some moolah with them, Jonathan Betts, group business director at ZenithOptimedia, says there are instances when being too targeted works against you.
Speaking at the Programmatic Summit in Sydney last week about some of the biggest challenges facing technology at the moment, Betts explained how everyone was talking about wanting their ads to be targeted.
“What I’m finding is that every client wants the media that they do to be more and more targeted,” he said.
“The danger of being too targeted is you can actually start to narrow your impact. You have an assumption about this group of people… you could actually make your performance worse.
Betts also doesn’t believe in customer loyalty. When talking about different campaigns and targeting different sets of consumers, he was erring about whether one type attracts more loyal customers than another.
“I think loyalty is a reflection of the purchase you’re looking at and the size of the brand itself. In a lot of categories, the opportunity for advertisers is to take people who are buying that category but aren’t buying your brand, maybe then you’ll target them.”
While not a believer in customer loyalty, for those who do believe, Betts says they’re a very valuable asset for a brand.
“But should they technically be the target for advertising? When someone is buying your brand, that behaviour is not necessarily going to shift if I don’t have communication. The opportunity is to shift the behaviour with people who don’t have a relationship with the brand.
“The job often is actually focusing on the people who you can convert to the brand than the people who are already full in-love with it.
“If anyone is in-love with any brands.”
