The idea of a target audience is essential in marketing. You need an idea of who you’re trying to reach to craft marketing material or develop any level of campaign strategy.

But audience targeting has altered in the last 20 years. We have hard data on what used to be speculation. Where and when we reach a target audience is fundamentally different.

Digital media is the catalyst, particularly with the impact of social media and mobile internet.

The most obvious example of this is how geographic demographics have changed. Local retail has moved toward e-commerce. We buy from anywhere while sitting on the couch.

Digital life also leaves a data trail we can trace to map out a consumer’s lifestyle. This data promises even more accurate audience targeting, predicting needs and connecting in micro-moments.

The goal of audience targeting remains the same: to make your marketing more effective by connecting to the right people.

Here are some ideas, theories and practices that will give you a frame of reference to target audiences for your offer.

Heuristics in audience targeting

Targeting an audience by creating personas or relying on a particular characteristic is based on heuristics; it’s not a precise process with guarantees.

The main heuristic used in audience targeting is to define an individual example and have it represent a general population. So, a marketing team might collect a set of demographic and psychographic traits to develop a persona. That persona is an individual that represents the entire target audience.

Rory Sutherland describes how Sheba Cat Food used a single survey to create their target audience. They asked only one question:

Which do you spend more on, the gift for your cat’s birthday or Christmas?

If people respond that they spent more on one or the other, they’re in the audience. If they state the question is crazy, that they don’t buy gifts for a cat, they’re not in the audience.

This is hardly precise, nor very scientific. But it does make a usable connection between the product and the audience by isolating a behavior.

Initial audience targeting always uses heuristic models because it seeks to predict something that’s inherently unpredictable, namely human behavior. You never know if people will spend money on something until they actually spend their money.

But today’s models involve much less guesswork than past ones.

Micro-moments and targeting when

Say you sell hair dryers. You do research to discover that a demographic of girls, ages 13-17, prefers pink hairdryers with three different heat levels. That data influences your product development and audience targeting.

You know who your audience is — but that’s no longer enough.

A consumer who fits your target audience is drying her hair one morning, and her hairdryer dies on her. She feels an acute need at that moment to find a new hairdryer. She gets on her phone, looks up, “best pink hair dryers,” and buys it right there.

This is what Google calls a micro-moment.

Micro-moments are essentially mobile-driven. If a group of friends is in a city and decides they’d like to go out for Italian, a targeting moment is happening.  As the need arises, the ability to take action is immediate. Someone takes out their phone and searches for Italian restaurants nearby. The target audience exists only in this micro-moment. As soon as a decision is made, the target disappears.

Past heuristics created a persona without the context of where or when the need arose. This is no longer enough because consumers have instant access to content on their mobile phones.

Psychographic targeting

Most traditional audience targeting was by default demographic. That’s what marketers had data on. When it came to psychographics — targeting based on interests behaviors and lifestyles — marketers had to speculate.

The digital trail we leave today is a treasure chest of psychographic data. The dominant player here is Facebook, which not only captures data on users but also partners with consumer data-gathering companies that track all buying behavior.

Put all that together, and Facebook ads let you target based on interests, politics, religion, health, family and work data with precision.

Say, for example, you’re a moving company. There is a host of demographics you might target for your ads. Or you could just use Facebook’s data to target people it has narrowed down as likely to move:

This image notes an important consideration. It’s possible to make your audience so specific that it’s too narrow to be effective. In fact, it’s been shown that you can actually target a single individual with Facebook ads.

Fortunately, the tools help you adjust your reach. Correct targeting today is neither too broad nor too narrow.

Behavioral economics

In the past, a great deal of audience targeting was derived from the theories of neoclassical economics.

Neoclassical economics understands that value is a perception dependent on the relationship between the product and the consumer buying it. A product cheap to manufacture can have a perceived value that drives prices up.

But neoclassical economics makes several assumptions that limit audience targeting in marketing. They are:

1. That people act as independent agents, not influenced by the conditions around them.
2. People make decisions based on complete, relevant information.
3. People will seek to maximize utility out of goods and services they obtain.

If you feel a kind of mathematical logic behind this, you’re right. This became orthodoxy because economists and — by extension — businesses, wanted to describe economic activity in scientific terms. Businesses expected to view marketing strategy in spreadsheets that analyzed and predicted ROI as a numerical expression.

It’s all very neat and clean, but fallible. The problem, of course, is that people make decisions emotionally, then post-rationalize. We are strongly influenced by the conditions around us and often make illogical choices that do nothing to maximize utility.

Behavioral economics applies psychology and neuroscience to understand the irrational, emotional elements of decision-making.

To target consumers today, you need to consider what they feel in the context of where they are. Part of that context is when their need is active.

Conclusions

It’s a general consensus in marketing today that the neoclassical view of consumer behavior is unrealistic. You can’t target consumers based on the idea that they make informed, rational decisions that are always in their best interests.

Instead, we have to consider the emotional drivers in decision making, and the social context in which those decisions are made.

Likewise, we must consider how technology changes the way businesses connect with consumers, and how this affects the entire buying cycle. It can make it much shorter — or much longer — than used to be possible.

Many business owners today persist in wanting marketing strategy and audience targeting to fit neatly into a spreadsheet that can predict a numerical ROI.  We get people calling Marketing 360® who ask if we can guarantee results. This is like asking the weatherman to guarantee it won’t rain on your vacation next month.

The reason that people like numbers and clear, technical solutions is that they avoid loose ends. They plot sequences that seem predictable.

But emotions don’t fit into this schema. To accurately target an audience, you have to consider the imprecise nature of human behavior.

Still, technology is making strides. We’re now clicking buttons on advertising platforms that do, in fact, account for behaviors and predict life changes.

When you envision a buyer persona, take into account the irrational element of decision-making. You can’t make exact measurements, but you can make valid predictions.

Originally published on 7/3/17