How to Select your Advertising Target
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Written by Atila on October 25, 2008 – 2:36 am
One of the main questions in advertising is: who? Who do you sell to, who do you persuade, who is the key influence, who actually purchases, who makes the key decisions, who is most important to you, who – in short – is your audience?
Advertising costs money. Often the sums are considerable and rarely does the money come easy to the advertiser. That money should be spent properly, which means it should be spent accurately. A failure of efficiency is a waste of the budget.
And efficiency means directing the right messages in the right way at the right people. Advertising equals communication. It is vital for effective communication to address the correct audience – the one that matters.
Targeting lies at the heart of the communications process.
Right at the very beginning of the process the advertiser must decide who to talk to, who to select as the audience for the message. Sometimes this is simple. An advertisement for a cook for a school canteen would begin by finding people with suitable experience – those who are or have been cooks in an industrial, educational or health-care kitchen. It is an obvious starting point.
An advertisement for dental chairs would aim at dentists (though maybe not only dentists. Targeting gets more complex quite rapidly). An announcement about pension increases would go to the elderly.
A new Civic Centre in Wolverhampton would be announced to the people of Wolverhampton. Advertising a new high-performance motorbike would no doubt aim at people interested in, possessing, or currently using a motorbike.
But targeting is not always as simple as that. Who do you select as the target for a new Mini car? The young? Those with less money? Those who want a second car? Mums? Who would be the target for sherry advertising? The elderly? Confirmed drinkers? Up-market households? Or new drinkers? And who do you advertise to for office copiers? Think of the possibilities. Targets might include:
- secretaries
- department heads
- purchasing managers
- managing directors
- all middle managers in a firm.
The answer is a matter of judgement.
Get it right and the campaign will strike home. Get it wrong, and the money is wasted, the opportunity is wasted, the time is wasted.
It is, commonsense dictates, vital to get the target right. Sometimes this is an easy matter, and sometimes the target is difficult to determine – sometimes, indeed, almost impossible to determine. This is what makes advertising an art as well as a science.
