3 Essential Tips for Advertising to a Highly Specialized Audience?Segment?

Several years ago, I was the media planner and buyer for a scrappy political party. My job, as with all media buys, was to make a big impact with a modest budget. We were playing to win in a riding situated just outside of Toronto, part of the broader Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Falling squarely within the largest media market in Canada, purchasing traditional media in this riding would be prohibitively expensive. I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars for a single 30-second TV spot and several hundred dollars for the same on radio. We’d be reaching 6 million+ people when we only needed to reach 135K voters - a criminally inefficient buy. Thus, the traditional methods of reaching our target audience with paid advertisements were off the table.  

More recently, my media planning work is mainly digital. In this sphere, we have many more opportunities to segment audiences, and can often pinpoint our target audiences with scalpel-like precision. However, I still encounter extraordinarily specific audiences that cannot be segmented with even the most cutting-edge DSP software. Not even data from the likes of Bombora and Dunn & Bradstreet can isolate these elusive professionals. I might be able to capture my targeted segment by casting a wider net, but not without wasting major advertising dollars and skewing our data by generating engagement from the wrong people. It’s effectively the same problem I encountered all those years ago during the by-election - the traditional methods of reaching our target audience are off the table. 

This scenario is familiar to anyone who has encountered a hard to reach audience segment. When you can’t rely on the old faithfuls, you have to be flexible and creative. 

Here are 3 essential tips for reaching a tricky audience with digital advertisements. 

(1) Dig Deep

When the traditional ways to get at your elusive audience segments don’t work, it’s time to do some research. With the election ads conundrum, I physically drove to the riding to investigate alternative methods of advertising. Any corner store with a digital screen, any hyper-localized community newspaper, heck even the local hockey arena with ad space got a call from me. You can do the same when media planning in the digital advertising space. To reach a highly specific B2B audience with digital banner ads, you may need to find a highly specialized DSP. For instance, MultiView Inc. can target trade associations in the healthcare vertical in a way few others can. Specialized DSPs are a good start, and you’ll want to add to that by digitally surround your target audience in as many places as possible. Learn where your target audience goes for industry news. In some cases, you will have little choice but to do a direct trade media buy. Get to know and love your vendors - you may need them more than they need you depending on the budget you are working with. 

(2) Zero In 

If appropriate, ask your client to share the LinkedIn profiles of a few people who would be the ideal person they are trying to reach with their ads. If these sample specimens have fully filled out their LinkedIn profiles, you may be able to tap into a goldmine of insights, from their top skills to the groups/professional associations they are part of, and the media organizations they follow. Zero in on the few to give you a roadmap of how to reach the many others just like them. You can use this targeting information to build out your LinkedIn ads audiences. It might also prove useful for building targeting parameters on other social media networks as well, and/or give you some hot leads for additional options you may not have thought of. Even better, leverage your email lists. if you have first-party data, you can use the email matching functions on LinkedIn and other media platforms to advertise to your target audience directly (just mind the minimum match rates).

(3) Learn & Tweak

Pay close attention to the digital cues your ads are sending back to you. You’ve written killer copy and have a great image that should resonate with these professional unicorns if the ad reaches them, or at least you think so. Your click-through rates will tell you if your audience is finding the ad interesting. But it’s your Google Analytics (GA) metrics that will tell you a deeper story. Examine the bounce rate, time on site, and the number of pages visited. If you have a high bounce rate and a low average time on site, those clicks may not be coming from the right audience. You should tweak your ads and incorporate A/B testing to see which messaging is resonating the best with your target audience. 

Hard to reach audiences take time to build, but it’ll be worth it when the clicks and conversions start to roll in. 

If I missed anything, please let me know below!