Marketing efforts need to be targeted to generate better results. The question is, "How targeted should your strategy be?" Hyper-targeted, that's how!
Personalization is an integral part of a marketing campaign. Some of the most successful interactive campaigns tap into ever-evolving local market micro-trends, enabling marketers to make precise hyper-targeted adjustments to their marketing strategies.
In this blog, we'll share what hyper-targeted marketing and advertising are, ways to make your strategy hyper-targeted, the benefits of hyper-targeted marketing, and real-world examples of hyper-targeted ads.
What Is Hyper-Targeted Marketing?
Hyper-targeted marketing is about delivering digital content – usually through advertising – to a defined audience based on its specific interests and characteristics.
Hyper-targeting filters your audience into distinct groups and designs personalized messages for each. The idea is that no matter how niche your audience is, you can target them with relevant messaging.
Hyper-targeted advertising, for instance, can be delivered using platforms such as Google, Bing, and a variety of social media platforms, including:
- Facebook
- Instagram
- TikTok
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Pinterest
Why Do You Need Hyper-Targeted Marketing?
Not only has the internet changed the way we consume information, but it has also changed the way we receive and perceive it too. This has made broadcasting product information irrelevant, as it can't be personalized and targeted effectively.
The rise of the internet has disrupted advertising. Before the 1990s, brands relied heavily on word of mouth to gain local popularity. This changed forever as internet penetration increased.
Today, 87% of people use more than one device to consume content simultaneously. This means consumers are constantly online, and this digital generation demands personalization in the searches they conduct when looking for information online.
As many as 76% of consumers are likely to purchase from a brand that personalizes communication, and 86% said personalized messages impacted their purchase decisions.
These numbers make a robust case for personalized communication, which means hyper-targeted advertising is a must, as it's the only method that gives options to personalize messages.
Best Practices for Developing a Hyper-Targeted Strategy
There are multiple ways to drill down into a large audience and target the people most likely to respond to your marketing messages. You can follow the best practices below to design a hyper-targeted marketing strategy.
Create a Buyer Persona
Create customer profiles based on characteristics like age, gender, occupation, job, income, geography, interests, and more.
When you consider multiple factors, you end up with more than one customer profile likely to be interested in your product or service. Then, design multiple campaigns to target each customer profile.
Let's understand this with an example:
You want to advertise your gym. You get three buyer personas you want to target when creating customer profiles. These personas are:
- Corporate employees with good-paying jobs
- Stay-at-home moms
- Athletes interested in hard-core training
This concept is known as micro-segmentation. You divided your broad customer base into small actionable pools. Micro-segmentation helps you deliver relevant messages to each group.
Create Unique Ad Copy
Consumers respond well to personalized ads. Once you have your target buyers' profiles, you can now work on developing separate ad copy and messages for each customer profile.
Again, you will deal with multiple niches and must create a unique message for each niche.
Let's take the gym example a little further. The corporate employees' goal for joining your gym would be fitness. Moreover, they will be looking for time slots early in the morning, before their office opens, or late in the evening, after finishing work.
Your ad goal would be to motivate them to stay fit and communicate that you have available early morning or late evening slots. In the same way, your messaging strategy will change for the other profiles.
Test, Monitor, and Analyze
Micro-segmenting your customer base helps you refine your hyper-targeted marketing strategy. However, things might need improvement at the initial attempt.
First, you will have to test the effectiveness of your ad campaign by analyzing the various parameters, such as click rate, time spent on a particular page on the website, and forms submitted.
If you're not getting the desired outcome, you'll have to tweak your message, change the platform, or refine your customer profiles.
Tie Hyper-Targeting in with Your Broader Marketing Vision
Your hyper-targeted ad strategy can't function independently. It must be in line with the vision of your brand and must be designed in such a way that it helps you achieve your marketing objectives.
Let's discuss the gym example again. Suppose your business vision promotes body positivity and health through your gym. In that case, you can't have hyper-targeted copy about losing those extra pounds targeted toward stay-at-home moms. Instead, you need to write copy that talks about weight and health in a positive light.
Hyper-Local Marketing Strategy to Achieve Hyper-Targeted Marketing
People often confuse hyper-local ad strategy with hyper-targeted ad strategy; however, they aren't the same. Hyper-local advertising is a subset of hyper-targeted advertising.
In simple words, going hyper-local means you will be targeting people according to geography, but the area will be limited to a radius of a few miles. So, you will be targeting a specific neighborhood in a city. This can be referred to as geotargeting.
How Does Geotargeting Work?
Geotargeting helps brands convert "near me" searches into "near you" business opportunities. To benefit from geotargeting, brands can use Google Ads, social media platforms, and local SEO.
Running a geotargeted ad campaign is easy using Google Ads. It allows you to customize your target location as much as you want. Here, you can select a particular city or a radius of a few miles. The same is the case with running geotargeted campaigns on social media platforms.
You need an effective local SEO strategy to boost visibility online. Customer reviews, citations, and Google My Business are the three pillars of local SEO strategy.
Global vs. Local? The Answer Is "Both"
International businesses with global acclaim need hyper-targeted marketing to become locally relevant. This makes hyper-targeted marketing a must for global brands.
Done properly, hyper-targeted marketing can provide incredible ROI, with brands ringing the target audiences' doorbells with personalized messages resonating with their search intent and interests. Hyper-targeted marketing makes global brands “glocal”.
Investing in hyper-targeted marketing will have a ripple effect. It builds brand recognition in the area where the business is located. People will become familiar with the brand name and its products and services.
Transcreation of Content for Local Markets
Brands have to transcreate their content for the local market. Translation isn't enough. Your content must be in the local language and culturally nuanced for your target audience to understand and accept it.
Creating content locally using local artists and social media influencers would be the best way to transcreate your content, especially videos. Transcreated content defines the success of your hyper-targeted, hyper-local ad campaign.
Real-World Examples of Hyper-Targeted Campaigns
While hyper-targeted marketing is almost a buzzword these days, some brands have done an exceptional job designing personalized campaigns and have significantly benefited from their strategy.
Cisco
Cisco does this exceptionally well. Despite being a global giant, it employs a "local language first" approach to content creation.
The company understands the need to share and tell stories in the local language for them to be relevant. As a result, it has a policy where 70% of the brand's guidelines and strategy are driven globally.
The remaining 30% is the game changer, allowing Cisco to embrace local nuances and make a campaign relevant for audiences in a local country.
Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn, a German railway company, did something incredible with its hyper-targeted marketing strategy. Its social media marketing campaign "No Need to Fly" encouraged Germans to book train tickets to travel within their country rather than taking an expensive flight to a remote location.
By doing data-driven research and analytics, it identified the destinations people were searching for and then identified their German look-alikes. It then juxtaposed these iconic international destinations with their German lookalikes and targeted travel enthusiasts by using the customers' social media activity data.
They could further pinpoint the nearest airport to the customer and the desired destination using geotargeting and AI. Deutsche Bahn was able to deliver a side-by-side comparison of prices between the two destinations, highlighting the price differential of traveling locally.
With thousands of dynamic and personalized ad variations produced, the "No Need to Fly" marketing campaign was highly successful, resulting in a +850% click-through rate and a 24% increase in sales revenue for Deutsche Bahn.
The Deutsche Bahn campaign is one of the best examples of a hyper-targeted, hyper-local ad campaign.
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