THE BASICS FOR TARGETING YOUR AUDIENCE WITH VIDEO ADS.

Everyone in marketing and communications knows that social media can be an extremely powerful tool for engaging with a target audience and introducing that audience to your brand.

Depending on which platform you are using and its specific capabilities, advertisers can target their audience based on a large number of characteristics found in their user profiles or through algorithmic inferences (based on the kind of content they engage with), making it a highly effective tool for targeting the right buyer persona at the right moment to drive them to a measurable action.

Everyone on the agency side of the equation will probably tell you that there honestly is no one-size-fits-all strategy for advertising videos on social (it varies considerably depending on the brand, the product, the audience and so much more), but as I do get regular enquiries from clients and members of my network about video ads, I've decided to write this short article with the plan of going through some of the basic high-level capabilities of three of the most popular social channels: Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM TARGETING OPTIONS

There are a wide range of targeting options on the Facebook network, including demographic, behavior, and interest targeting.

If you want your campaign to be a success make sure that you browse the list of available targeting options in the platform itself to find the right targeting options for you:

Logic Rules for Targeting

You should make sure that you pay attention to the logic rules for targeting on Facebook (getting it right = great results, getting it wrong = not so great results).

Each box represents a group of audiences that you might potentially target.

Within a box, Facebook will leverage the ‘OR’ functionality, meaning someone can be in one audience OR the other and still see your ad.

If we were running a campaign based on the image above, we would be targeting anyone who has shown interest in either Italy OR Spain.

But if we wanted to tailor audiences much further than this, for example reaching only users who are interested in Italy AND Spain, then we would need to click the blue ‘Narrow Audience’ link and create a new box (as seen below):

Once you have this new box, you would be able to choose the other parameters you might want to add:

The image included above means that based on our new parameters users must be interested in ItalyAND Spain to see our video ads.

This is a great tool if you want and need to reach a very specific audience.

Each time you leverage ‘AND’ functionality, you limit the audience size of who can see your video, so keep that in mind when layering on targeting.

If your audience gets too small, it can be hard to scale and the price of reaching each user could go up substantially.

Need an easy way to target? Try: Lookalike Audiences

One of the best and most dynamic targeting options on Facebook is Lookalike Audiences.

With Lookalike Audiences, you can create what is termed a root or source audience.

These can be based on a customer upload file or a website retargeting list (all website visitors, all converting visitors, etc.) Facebook will then analyse the behaviour of that source audience and come up with a persona, then work to identify users that behave similarly on the Facebook/Instagram platforms.

This is especially useful for when your target audience doesn’t exactly fall in line with the preset targeting categories, mentioned above, but still spends a good amount of time on either of the two platforms.

Lookalike audiences are based on a percentage of the total population of a country, so when targeting users in Hong Kong, the smallest Lookalike Audience might be something like 40,000 to 100, 000 users.

That might sound like a lot, but remember that you are able to layer on additional targeting, like demographics and geo-targeting, to ensure that you are reaching the most qualified users.

YOUTUBE TARGETING OPTIONS

On YouTube, there are two main ways to target your audience: the person (based on their demographics, characteristics, etc.) or the content they’re viewing.

Once you choose your main targeting strategy, you can begin to select additional targeting options.

Below is a basic overview of each targeting option, in order from narrowest to broadest targets, to get you started:

• Placements: Target individual channels and videos where they’re talking about things relevant to your business.
• Keywords: Show your ad to users based on keywords/phrases related to specific videos, channels, or type of website users are interested in.
• Topics: Reach users as they’re watching videos related to the topics in Google’s designated preset list of Topics.
• In-Market: Similar to Topics, choose from a list of preset Google audiences of users that Google has determined are in the market to make a purchase.
• Custom Intent: Similar to In-Market audiences, these are designed to target users who are actively looking to make a purchase, but with Custom Intent, you can more narrowly focus on what the person is interested in buying by supplying keywords and URLs to direct the audience tool.
• Life Events: Target users who are likely going through a large life-changing phase, like moving, graduating from college, or getting married.
• Similar Audiences: Target users who are similar to your retargeting lists. (This targeting is very similar to Lookalike Audiences on Facebook.)
• Affinity: Show ads to users who fit into broad groups of preset lists of users from Google. This is meant to mimic advertising on TV, so these audiences can be fairly broad.
• Custom Affinity: Affinity audiences, but created based on keyword phrases and URLs you provide to narrow targeting to be more specific than the preset Affinity audiences.

Need an easy way to target? Try: Custom Intent Audiences

Custom Intent audiences can be a good place to start when it comes to getting started with YouTube video targeting.

Ideally, you are using video to reach users who are more likely to make a purchase or use your services/solutions than others.

With Custom Intent, you can both target users who are potentially going to make a purchase soon, while having the ability to tailor the targeting to your specific use rather than relying on In-Market audiences Google has already supplied.

LINKEDIN TARGETING OPTIONS

LinkedIn is a great platform for targeting, you can reach users based on a large number of very useful and practical parameters:

LinkedIn, more than any of the other channels I have discussed in this article, relies on a frequency cap to ensure their users don’t get overloaded with ads.

For this reason, it’s important to pay attention to audience size if you want to get any type of significant traction with your ads.

If you are using the platform for branding purposes, stick with a larger audience size to ensure you reach a good network of users.

The biggest downside of LinkedIn is that this amazing B2B targeting comes with a price. LinkedIn has some of the highest costs per click (CPCs) of all the social platforms.

The good news with video is that you only pay when someone clicks.

So if all a user does is view your video, you won’t be charged, but you likely made an impression on the user (an impression that may lead to an action further down the road but not directly measurable from the platform).

With initial campaigns, often the best strategy is to keep audience sizes on the larger end and bid at the absolute lowest price that you possibly can.

Make sure that you choose the manual bidding option in your campaign and set it to the lowest LinkedIn will allow.

This ensures you’ll get the lowest CPCs for your videos, while still reaching a wide audience.

Need an easy way to target? Try: Groups + Job Characteristics

Target users who not only fit a particular job description you are interested in, but are also interested in the type of content you are aiming to promote.

Do this by targeting relevant Groups and then layering in a job characteristic based on the Groups you find.

To be in a Group on LinkedIn, search them out and join.

Typically, users who belong in Groups are also slightly more engaged active users on the LinkedIn platform (who check in and contribute daily, rather than casual users who may check in once or twice a month).

Based on the Groups you find, layer in some aspect of the job you expect your target audience to have.

Depending on the Groups you’re targeting, this could be more or less specific.

STILL NEED MORE HELP?

Reach out to me and the team at APV! We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you understand more about how to target your audience with video ads and how to make amazing content that connects your story to your audience!

Thomas J Elliott is the Senior Producer/Director for APV an advertising agency specialising in video and animation with offices in Wan Chai Hong Kong. 

He is a winner of numerous international awards for video and animation and the author of five books on visual content.

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