Hypertargeting 301: Maximize Demographics, Psychographics and Behaviors for Your Brand

We’ve covered off on ways that you can target people across Spotify and Pandora. Now we’ll get into the even geekier ways to target people through Facebook advertising, which offers segmenting by demographics, psychographics and behavior—all provided by users. Thanks, Facebook!

Targeting galore via Facebook (AKA 19% of the world’s population).

  • Demographics — Ex. location, age, language
  • Psychographics — Ex. preferences, interests, hobbies
  • Behavior — Ex. shopping habits, mobile use

Each one of the above components has the potential to slim down your Facebook advertising campaign’s audience to only the most meaningful handful of individuals you’d like to reach, for a much more budget-friendly solution. The science is in choosing the right mix of filters to develop your segment.

Consider the difference, for example, between someone who likes The Hunger Games Trilogy and someone who likes “Hunger Games,” or people who live in Austin versus people who grew up there, or those interested in McDonald’s and those interested in “McDonald’s legal cases.” These subtle differences aren’t just the things that us marketers geek out about during Friday at 4 happy hours, it’s the stuff of dreams … or at least the stuff that stands to help you reach the right people with your advertisement in a cost effective way.

We create targeted ads and interpret correlations from the results, which give us even more data to experiment with. If we started by targeting people who are interested in McDonald’s legal cases and discovered through advertising that we’re reaching primarily those 16–28 who live in New York and San Francisco, that’s great stuff to work with for future marketing efforts. Rooted in insight, a $100 ad can go further than a billboard in reaching its intended audience.

Here’s a breakdown of the Facebook hypertargeting process from start to finish:

  1. Choose an objective. Objectives range from publicity to conversions, and include actions on and off Facebook. You can promote your website, boost conversion rates on a landing page, fish for Facebook Likes, get video views, or any one of a host of actions you’d like a someone to take.
  2. Target by demographics. Start with demographics: location (country, state, and city), age range, gender, and language. Further demographics include job and family status, income and net worth, education level, ethnicity, and more.
  3. Target by interests. This is where things become truly multidimensional. Be as broad or specific as you’d like—you could target people who like music, or pop music, or Katy Perry; or who misspell her name “Katie Perry,” or who hate Katy Perry; or all, or any combination thereof. Or foodies who are into hot dog variations. Or gambling nudists who like “anything funny.”
  4. Target by behaviors. Have members of your audience bought a car in the last six months? Did they just come back from a vacation? Have they refused to upgrade to a new iPhone? Do they donate to environmental causes? Are they fashionistas who buy a lot of gifts for friends and family? Do they spend inordinate amounts of money online? Each behavior allows you to devise, with precision, an audience receptive to your offer.
  5. Dance because you’re hypertargeting now.
  6. Set your budget. Ideally, the more specific your hypertargeting parameters, the smaller your budget should be. Broad campaigns, on the other hand, call for broad spending.
  7. Create your ad. Create the perfect ad. Craft your messaging to resonate with the audience you’ve defined, upload an image or several (more images equal more chances to determine the perfect one) and place your order.
  8. Test, tweak, repeat. Once your ad is up and running, make sure to monitor its performance and make adjustments as necessary.

This approach, as well as the information you gain from hypertargeting, has applications outside of Facebook and even apart from advertising. Hypertargeting data tell you about what an audience values, deepening interactions on social media and sometimes revealing novel and lucrative market opportunities.

One last post in this hypertargeting series! What else are you interested in? Feel free to leave some comments below or reach out to us @GradyBritton on Twitter.

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