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Defining target audiences.
 Direct
mail marketers have always known that their success depends as much
on list to which they mail as on their offer and creative. Lists
with identical demographic and geographic selects and equivalent
non-deliverable percentages can generate response rates that vary by
300% or more.
Obviously target
audience selection is just as important in traditional mass and
digital media.
The Super Bowl
was a case in point. The cost of reaching 97.5 million viewers was
$2.7 million, a CPM of $27.69. A bit high, but not off the chart.
Especially when you consider that commercials in the Super Bowl are
virtually TiVo proof.
But... that's
$27.69 for every man, woman and child in the audience. Budweiser
bought seven of those $2.7 million spots (hopefully a volume
discount reduced the $18.9 million list price a bit) to reach male
beer drinkers. The CPM versus males all males was $46.15. Which
is getting pricy. And not all males are beer drinkers. And not all
beer drinkers drink a lot of beer. The true CPM(t) that is, cost
per thousand members of their target audience was probably on the
order of $400 for each one of Bud's seven spots.
Who's their true
target audience? Heavy beer drinkers. Back in the 1960s the
marketers at Schaeffer Beer, a Northeast regional brand, and their
agency, BBDO, figured out that the 80/20 rule worked big time in the
beer market. Heavy beer drinkers those who drink six or more
12-oz. beers a day accounted for more than 80% of total beer
sales. BBDO's Jim
Jordan created the first beer campaign focused on consumers' need
states with the classic "Schaeffer is the one beer to have when
you're having more than one." The two-beat structure and a simple
jingle made the positioning unforgettable and highly successful
for years.
Later, Miller
went Schaeffer one better with their classic Miller Time campaign.
McCann-Erickson strategist, Van vanBortel, did some research to
determine exactly who the heavy beer drinkers were.
His answer: the
reparative personality type. The group was defined as blue-collar
males, aged 35+, in first-level management jobs. A steel-mill
foreman, for example. But vanBortel went a crucial step farther,
with insight into the psychographics of the reparative personality
group. These men felt that their work kept the economy moving,
supported their families and was underappreciated. Their daily
half-dozen or more beers were their self-bestowed recognition and
reward for their otherwise unrecognized contributions.
Van's portrait of
the heavy beer drinker was the raw material from which Bill Backer
and Billy Davis crafted the great Miller Time campaign. It's been a
while, so here's a reminder of the kind of copy used to open the
spots: "Today you poured enough steel to build a bridge across the Mississippi. But the five o'clock whistle
just blew, and now it's Miller Time."
The campaign
talked to the target audience in their terms and about their
feelings. And it was a phenomenal success. In fact, it was so much
of a success that it was copied by Budweiser's "For all you do, this
Bud's for you."
There are many
examples of target audience selection impacting marketing success. A
few we've taken part in include:
·
Forms automation
software developer CLR Sprinter had been targeting IT departments.
After all, they were selling software. But a BrainPosse principal
realized that their software offered no perceptible advantage to the
IT group, but had significant sales and operational benefits.
Switching the target audience to top management and marketing
management increased qualified leads by a factor of nine, and
reduced the sales cycle from a year to three months.
·
Employer group
health insurer Cariten had been running a television campaign target
to the general public when a BrainPosse principal was asked to
develop a new strategy and creative. It became apparent that while
an organization's employees were the ones covered by health
insurance, they had virtually no say in the choice of insurance
provider selected for coverage. Redefining the target audience as
top management, financial executives and human resources department
personnel helped multiply Cariten's sales, and took them from a
$14.7 million loss to a $10.6 profit.
·
The Fort Worth
Convention and Visitors Bureau targeted its campaign to individual
travelers within a day's drive of the city. A BrainPosse principal
realized that the available budget would not be able to reach and
attract a significant number of
individual visitors, and re-focused the effort on package
tour operators and convention and meeting planners. In the first
year of the new campaign more than 300,000 additional room nights
were booked.
·
Most hospitals
get a substantial percentage of their admissions through emergency
department visits. However, a disproportionate number of emergency
department patients are uninsured. A BrainPosse client hospital is
about to experiment with a direct mail effort targeted to ZIP+4
carrier routes which have demographics consistent with high levels
of private insurance and Medicare coverage, to attract paying
emergency room patients without attracting increased numbers of
non-paying patients. In many markets, addressable cable is another
practical alternative to reach demographically/geographically
targeted audiences.
The targeting
capabilities of the internet offer tremendous opportunities to
marketers. There is still a lot of disagreement about preferred
vehicles, metrics and even pricing. But as Lord Leverhume or John
Wannamaker (depending on whether you're a Brit or an American)
famously said: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is
wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half." There's enough
potential in the net to make it worth wasting half an internet
budget to take advantage of what the other half will bring in.
We happen to
believe in search, both organic and paid. Being at or near the top
of the list when someone Googles "refrigerators" will, of course,
mean paying to reach a very few kids doing a report on the history
of refrigeration. But an investment in either search engine
optimization or paid search will get a lot more people who are in
the market for a new side-by-side.
A lot of industry
data seems to indicate that banners and pop-ups get less viewership
with each passing day but, on a pay-per-click basis, contextual or
behavioral ads obviously deliver a well-targeted audience that has
at least seen the advertiser's message. If the product or service
lends itself to cost-per-action pricing, it's a no-lose proposition
for the advertiser.
As with
traditional media, the key to effective targeting online is in
well-thought-out audience definition. Who are the key purchase
decision makers for the bulk of sales in the product category? How
many of them do you need to reach? And in what environment will you
find them most receptive to your message?
Target audience
selection alone won't do the job, of course.
But without good target audience selection even the most
insightful strategy and the most effectively communicating creative
won't deliver bottom-line results.
Want to
re-examine who you need to reach and how you need to reach them? Contact us by clicking here or by calling (865)
330-0033.
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