12November2008
Posted by robgraham under: Uncategorized.
For over the past 150 years, US companies have been actively involved in the process of advertising their products and services to a wide-range of consumers. The mechanics of most of these marketing efforts has been based on the concept of ‘reach and frequency’, namely - getting the advertising in front of as many eyeballs as possible. In a nutshell, the more people who see the ad the more new customers will be acquired. Or so we like to think.
There is little doubt that exposure to a brand or service increases the number of customers for that brand or service. But the mass marketing models of yesteryear are also highly inefficient and often rely on large numbers without being able to real measure if individual marketing programs are moving the needle or not.
The challenge most traditional media faces is that marketers are unable to know exactly how this media is being ‘consumed’ by consumers. For example, an advertiser can easily measure if a 30 second commercial spot has been played as contracted with a media outlet but can’t get a clear picture of exactly how many people saw the ad, how many understood the offer, how many made a mental note to check out the offer in the future…and how many were in the kitchen making a snack when the commercial ran.
One of the greatest advantages that online advertisers have today is the ability to accurately measure how their advertising is being ‘consumed’. The internet is a dynamic environment. Nothing online takes place without a consumer making a decision every step of the way. And every single point of contact between consumers and advertisers can be measured as well. This means that the guessing game has gone out of advertising. It’s no longer about getting an ad in front of as many people as possible, it’s now about getting the right message in front of the greatest number of people who will respond to that ad in some way. Measure how consumers are interacting with an ad and you can measure the overall effectiveness of that ad. Every single click.
This advertising accountability also means that marketers can measure campaign results during every stage of the campaign and don’t have to wait until the ‘smoke clears’ at the end of the campaign to determine success or failure. This means that no campaign’s fate is set in stone but gives advertisers plenty of time to make changes to the creative, the media buy and any other points of campaign optimization which can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a disaster.
If you’re interested in learning more about how online advertising campaigns can be tracked and measured, I invite you to check out a brand new full-day training course called “Intelligent Research, Targeting & Measurement of Online Ads & Audiences “ offered through The Laredo Group. This training focuses on helping marketers better understand the online marketing process and how to plan campaigns which can be measured and optimized along the way to greatly improve marketing results. You can learn more about the schedule and costs of these training programs as http://www.laredogroup.com/seminars3.asp.
11September2008
Posted by robgraham under: Uncategorized.
This past week my wife and I sat down to watch Fox television’s new show ‘Fringe’. The show had been safely captured by our DVR (we rarely watch any live TV anymore) and after getting the chores done, the kids to bed and the dog fed, we were able to sit down and zone in front of the tube for awhile.
I won’t make a secret of it: part of the reason I have embraced my DVR over the past few years is because it lets me quickly move past the commercials. I won’t lie; the shows are much more enjoyable without long and frequent interruptions. Now, this isn’t to say that I haven’t stopped and rewound the data stream to watch ads that I’ve never seen before but I can still easily tell the difference between a commercial that is relevant to me personally and one that isn’t even while being fast forwarded. I think of the remote as my own frequency cap.
However, while watching Fringe I found myself making the decision to just watch the ads. Why? Because I knew how long the break would last because Fox told me. If the program is returning in 60 seconds (as the show informed me at the first break) then it really wasn’t worth the time to hunt for the remote and spin past 2 commercials. I could wait.
Years ago while designing rich media ad units I was able to determine that ads that requested data from consumers did much better if they revealed how much data would be requested before the consumer got started. For example, (and remember we were working with 468 x 60 ad unit sizes not that long ago) if an advertiser wanted to collect name and address information it may require several screen to get it all in. However, simply grabbing email and mail data might require multiple screens. From where the consumer sat the form might be two screens long or it might be 18. With this ‘hidden’ approach we could measure a significant decrease in the number of consumers who fell away from filling in the form at every new screen. In many cases few complete filled out the forms.
The simple solution that helped to bring these conversion numbers up was to simple leave a tag on each screen which noted ‘Screen 1 of 5, screen 2 of 5, etc’. In this way consumers had a full expectation of how detailed the process would be and how long it would take.
By setting consumer expectations advertisers have a greater amount of leverage. By simply communicating how involved (or easy) a process is means that consumers don’t have to guess or feel uncomfortable about their involvement. Discomfort leads to quick abandonment of the process.
We’ll see if Fox continues with their Fringe advertising approach for the rest of the season. I hope they do as I think they’re really stumbled on an interesting advertising approach.
25July2008
Posted by robgraham under: Uncategorized.
While many of the fundamentals surrounding effective marketing have been around for years, reaching consumers on the Internet is still a recent addition and one whose growth has dwarfed any single technological advance that came before it.
Let me restate that: the birth of the Internet has forever changed the very social structure of the world in only a few years. We live in a very different world than we did just 20 years ago.
In just the past 15 years we’ve seen the rise of email, web advertising, search engine marketing, online stores, blogging, social networks, podcasts, interactive advertising, video on demand, widgets and the birth of several million new ‘Online Media Channels’.
What has been most significant about these changes isn’t that we’ve created ways to shop without getting out of bed, have almost instant access to a cornucopia of information or can dial up an infinite variety of distractions and entertainment (both savory and not so much), but that we’ve created an amazing infrastructure which allows people to instantaneously communicate on a global scale.
Many of us grew up in a world that was simpler yet in many ways much more complicated. While we had access to many of the same things that we have online today, the models and our expectations were very different. For example, when I was a kid:
· Any television programming I watched was limited by that television’s distance from the broadcast tower and the quality of the antenna sitting on the top of the house or TV
· The same was true for radio with the possible advantage that it was often portable
· ‘Mail’ was something that was handled by the Postal service and it took roughly a week for a message to be sent and a reply to come back
· The telephone was generally too expensive to use for anything outside of local calls; international calls were almost unheard of
· Apart from limited catalog shopping, if you wanted something, you needed to leave the house to buy it
· If you wanted to interact with other people you had to be in the same room with them
Now, before I start sounding like an old fogy, the point I want to make is that all of these media types and interactions, which come with their own limitations and rules, can now take place on any computer connected to the Web.
The ability to communicate with others on an almost instantaneous level has changed the way we do business globally. And yet, these changes have also brought with them a severe shift in the ways we market to others in this new environment.
Unlike more traditional ‘linear’ media, the Web is, well, a web. There is generally no single path between the consumer and what they want to do while online. As a result, it’s much more difficult, as marketers, to place advertising messages where they are guaranteed to cross paths with consumers. This means that today’s online marketers lose the advantage that traditional marketers have shared of having distinct marketing venues which can force consumers down a path where ads are presented in exchange for access to the programs being watched/listened to. Because there is no set path through the web, consumers are no longer obligated to even pay attention to advertising in order to gain access to most media content that they want.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Reaching everybody with the same message is an inefficient way to communicate. Internet Marketing offers huge advantages over most traditional marketing methods in reaching targeted consumers. However, to be effective in this area, marketers need to understand how to approach this new world so that they can effectively reach the right consumers with the right message at the right time.
6June2008
Posted by robgraham under: Targeting.
At one point or another in our lives, we’ve all heard the expression ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’. However, making snap judgments based on first impressions is more often general practice for most of us. We do judge books by their covers, make decision based on first impressions, and in many cases, end up misinterpreting value because of false or assumptive understanding.
I often kid my wife regarding how she assesses the quality of a restaurant. ‘That looks good’, she’ll state as we drive by the front of an eatery, using only the building, signage and lighting as her cues for the quality of the food inside.
Is this assessment accurate? Well, often a restaurant able to keep up a good appearance does so because they’re bringing in enough business. However, the quality and selection of food should ultimately be based on how it tastes to patrons and not its surrounding décor.
In advertising, our jobs are to create the outside of the restaurant and to reflect the quality of the food inside (metaphorically speaking). However, in order to do an effective job we need to make sure that this advertising also accurately reflects the possible meals waiting for patrons.
Perhaps as important, we need to get those ads in front of the right consumers, those most apt to take advantage of the offer, in order to be successful.
This brings us to the task of buying targeted media impressions.
Buying digital media isn’t an easy task nor is it cut and dried. Reaching any audience segment first requires understanding who that audience is and what they want or need. However, finding those little slivers of the population also requires an understanding of where they may be hiding. For the media buyer on the go, that’s often a case of making snap judgments based on first impression information.
But what criteria fit the bill here? Is it the name of the web site? Is it a peek at the demographic skew of those who come to the site? Is it based on a contextual understanding between the advertising the site content? Or (in a perfect world) is it based on an understanding of the value that a site lends to a brand because it truly does reach the right audience with the right message?
Case in point: The Christian Science Monitor newspaper has been around for almost 100 years. During that time it has become one of the only daily international papers in the country. It provides a well balanced look at news from around the world and has won many awards for journalistic integrity. It reaches an older demographic skew (mid 60s +) and the online counterpart (csmonitor.com) offers the same level of content to a slightly younger skew (47+). Christian Science Monitor readers are generally well educated, affluent and with disposable incomes.
However, for the Christian Science Monitor ad sales team, finding advertisers looking to reach this prime audience often means first educating media buyers about what the Christian Science Monitor IS NOT.
The Christian Science Monitor isn’t about Christianity. It doesn’t cater to a conservative fundamentalist demographic nor is it a mouthpiece for the Church of Christ, Scientist. The paper was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, as a response to the ‘yellow journalism’ of her day, as an attempt to provide news that was based on world events and not on sensationalism and daily scandals. (sound familiar?)
What the Christian Science Monitor is about is providing very well balance news reporting that is based on an international network of journalists. It’s about offering a world view that doesn’t cater specifically to business interests. It’s about meeting the needs of a loyal readership. Period.
For the ad sales team at CSM, the assumptive moniker has been a double edged sword. While they don’t cater to a religious audience, a handful of advertisers assume that they do and place campaigns that are overtly religious. On the other hand, a number of media buyers automatically steer away from buying any media with CSM based on the assumption that it caters to strictly fundamentalist Christian audience.
The lesson to be learned here is that the assumptions we all make can work against us if we don’t take the time to separate our snap judgments from the reality of any situation. By taking a few minutes to learn about what’s really on the other side of the front of the restaurant, we get a much better sense of whether the meals offered match that first impression.
4May2008
Posted by robgraham under: Targeting; behavioral targeting.
Have you ever asked yourself the question ‘What is it that I do that makes people want to become my customers?’ Chances are you’ve already answered this question by thinking about the quality of products or services you offer or you’re willingness to go the extra mile. And you just may be right.
As marketers a large part of our jobs is to identify those factors which cause ‘consumers’ to become ‘customers’. Certainly there are a number of different reasons behind why the people we call our customers showed up in the first place but was this just lucky chance or are there ‘recipes’ for marketing success that we can identify and repeat?
Over the years there have been countless volumes exploring the reasons behind why people do what they do. As complex as most human behavior seems, a majority of the motivation behind why we do what we do can be traced back to two simple reasons:
To avoid pain
To find pleasure
While you may not consciously reflect on these behaviors daily you can easily run a quick acid test on yourself to determine that you do balance almost every action you take every day against what that means regarding your self-preservation, biological needs (like huger, thirst, sleep, sex), emotional needs (finding and holding onto love) and social needs.
We measure much of what we do everyday against how it may affect our overall well-being. Most of us learn at some point in our lives that stepping into a busy traffic intersection isn’t prudent; nor is diving off a tall bridge into 3 feet of water. Going to the office naked is generally a bad idea, as is being overly honest if your significant other wants to know if ‘this makes me look fat’. We learn that there are ways to prolong personal longevity by avoiding certain behaviors. Sadly, we sometime learn these important lessons by watching others make tragic mistakes.
To that point, we also balance the personal value of loss and gain against each other to assess behaviors. For example, we may desire to have a lot of money but few of us would consider robbing a bank as a way to fulfill this desire. While the desire for money may be strong, the fear of arrest, loss of freedom and possible death (not to mention violating a moral sense of right and wrong) can all serve to counter-balance the desire and make us not choose this particular path toward instant wealth.
As marketers we need to understand that consumers are people looking for solutions which help them avoid pain or help them gain something of personal value. This means that we need to clearly communicate what benefits we offer and how those benefits can tip the balance toward the consumer’s gain.
It has long been said that people buy things not for the items themselves but also for the emotions related to owning those items. Think about it for a moment. If you need a car to get back and forth from work then pretty much any car will do. However, there are dozens of different types of cars, trucks, vans, SUVs and variations in between available to choose from because consumers have personal reasons for why they buy specific automobiles.
While the underlying function of all cars may be to get from point A to point B, there are a number of characteristics that come with owning a specific type of vehicle that has little to do with its actual function.
A few years ago I did some research into the driving forces behind consumer decisions and was able to identify 7 questions that consumers subconsciously ask themselves when making a purchasing decision. These are:
Will this give me a sense of possibility?
Will this give me a sense of well-being?
Will this give me a sense of convenience?
Will this give me a sense of security?
Will this make me more productive/effective?
Will this give me a sense of continuity?
Will this enhance my social standing?
It’s also important to note that most consumers don’t take action if at least one of these questions can’t be answered.
Let’s take a quick peek of each of these questions in turn.
Sense of Possibility
Possibility is huge motivator for many of us. Because we have imaginations we can project the results of a decision. Seeing that the local lottery is sitting on a record jackpot is enough to motivate many of us to drop a few bucks to get our own tickets to the big event. While the odds of us willing are astronomically against us, we generally don’t dwell on that preferring instead to think about the possibility of winning huge amounts of money and what we would do with it.
The same holds true when we watch a commercial offering the latest and greatest exercise equipment. We focus on the possibility of having washboard abs and the reaction we’ll get next time we peel off our shirt at a beach party. The fact that before we get to that new and shapely self we have to face a lot of diet and exercise isn’t where we focus. Exercise and dieting aren’t necessarily pleasurable experiences even though the results may be.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include franchising and moneymaking techniques, lotteries and casinos, investment programs, dating services, etc.
Sense of Well Being
For consumers, the question of well-being is a strong motivator. Most of us would avoid any product which can only cause us harm and instead will look for those products and services which we believe will enhance our well being. In many cases the indication of well being might be more in the mind of the consumer than in reality.
For example, it is estimated that close to $400 million dollars will be spent this year in the US for anti-oxidant supplement alone even in the face of res
earch indicating that excess amounts of anti-oxidants in a diet might actually reduce life expectancy.
Diet supplements, another huge money making industry, offer weight loss but often at the risk of dangerous and potentially fatal side effects.
In short, we buy things that we believe are good for us even if there’s no solid reason behind those beliefs.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include foods, medicines, art, entertainment, health and wellness products, shelter, love collectibles and many consumer goods.
Sense of Convenience
We want things to be easy. That’s part of our quest for pleasure. Not that we’re all lazy but things that offer us a sense of convenience often free up our time to do other things that are more enjoyable than the task at hand.
The rise of fast food restaurants during the past few decades says less about our desire for greasy and highly caloric food choices and more about our desire to get through a meal quickly without having to go through the ritual of cooking, serving and cleaning as well.
In short, anything that saves us time and helps us to accomplish difficult or dull tasks is appealing to us.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include time saving devices, solutions to existing problems, easy-to-use and understand products, etc.
Sense of Security
As human beings, we’re already hard wired for self-preservation. In short, we react to dangerous circumstances often without consciously thinking about it. It’s known as our ‘fight or flight’ instinct.
We strive for security in our lives daily. Most of us work so that we can make money so we can afford things like homes and protection. The loss of such things is almost unimaginable to us and is often a huge motivator to keep our noses to the grindstone so that our sense of security is never breached.
We also have the ability to ask questions about our future security. Will we have enough money to live on when we’re older and stop working? What would happen to our families if we suddenly died? Do I have enough money put away to pay for my children’s education?
Products and services related to meeting these needs include insurance, investments, investment collectibles, safety devices, emergency items and personal protection.
Sense of Productivity/Effectiveness
Not unrelated to the motivators behind Security and Convenience, most of us are looking for products and services which will make us more productive and effective in the tasks we already do. Buying a new PDA can allow us to better organize our schedules; taking a night school course can help us to learn how to do a better job and increase our value to the organization; buying that new floor wax can reduce the time required to get a mirror shine on our kitchen floor.
Because we’re all striving to create the lives we want, anything that can help us with our daily tasks is a welcome addition.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include educational materials, time-saving devices, products the enhance physical and/or mentally strength, services that accomplish daily tasks (cleaning, cooking, child care, etc.)
Feeling Special/Advantaged
People like special treatment.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a deal at the supermarket for a ‘buy one get one free’ offer for all ‘gold card holders’ or becoming a member of an exclusive social club by invitation only. Being a member of an exclusive group is appealing to consumers and will motivate them to take action.
Scarcity is a tool that marketers have used effectively for years. By offering a limited number of anything along with the message ’buy now or lose your chance’ can be used to get people to take immediate action even if they don’t have an immediate or direct need.
Consumers also understand that a sale is a temporary thing and if they don’t take advantage of the offer right now they may never have the opportunity again and will feel regret.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include exclusive or limited offers, products that can be personalized, luxury products, one of a kind products, advanced, cutting edge technology.
Sense of Continuity
Human beings generally dislike change. Change is uncomfortable because it brings with it uncertainly. It also means that extra effort has to be made to adjust to the change.
Change could range from the loss of an appliance to the theft of a car to the expiration of a membership or subscription.
Marketers who can offer products that offer a sense of continuity will find receptive audiences.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include automatic bill paying services, warranties, insurance, product replacement, etc.
Sense of Social Standing
Our social standing is very important to us. Not only do we want to fit in but we also want to be seen as important members of society. In basic terms, we want others to think good things about us.
This desire for good social standing has its foundations in early human society. To be a member of the tribe meant the safety and comfort of others. To be turned away from the tribe for aberrant behaviors was surely a death sentence. Being the chief of the tribe also brought with it the benefit of greater access to food and preferred mates.
Today we still really care what other people think about us. We often buy the big house or fancy car because we want people to think we’re successful. We participate in civic activities because we want to feel like part of the community. In short, we want to belong and will buy things that show others that we do.
Products and services related to meeting these needs include fashions, cosmetics, personal grooming, self-improvement books and courses, job placement companies, large ticket and luxury items, etc.
By keeping these seven questions in mind when crafting new offers, marketers can provide answers which help consumers to meet their emotional needs and motivate them to become customers.
Rob Graham
4May2008
Posted by robgraham under: Targeting.
If you’ve been involved in marketing during the past decade, you’ve probably noticed that things are a bit different since this whole ‘online’ thing got underway.
While being online has starting to become an ‘ordinary’ part of many people ’s day-to-day lives, the experience of being online is very different from any other type of popular media.
Those of us over the age of twenty clearly remember a world without the ‘Internet’. Back in those olden days most media consisted of marketing channels to which the majority of the population flocked. In exchange for giving people access to this content, advertisers were given access to the people who came to visit. They tossed their messages in front of us as we wandered around hoping that something would catch our eye. Sometimes it did. Mostly it didn’t.
Because these mass marketing models were based on ‘quantity’ and not ‘quality’ of consumers, there was an up-front expectation that there would be a tremendous amount of waste. Advertisers understood that even if they were targeting the very best demographic group for an offer the vast majority wouldn’t even see or respond to the marketing offer.
For marketers, it was the safety in numbers advertising approach that kept them going.
This approach also trained us, as consumers, to understand that our direct involvement in the marketing process wasn’t really necessary. The TV commercials would continue to run whether we watched them or not; the print ads would stay right where they were printed even if we didn’t open the magazine or newspaper; the ad on the side of the bus would keep moving down Main Street would keep going even if we ignored it.
But the arrival of the online world started to change things and pretty dramatically. Consumers now have millions of “channels” to choose from and advertisers have fewer places where they will reach mass markets. In fact, the very structure of the Internet means that consumers don’t even need to look at or interact with advertising anymore…unless they really want to.
Culturally we’ve developed a number of ways to share information with one another. We’ve also learned how to customize messages so that they reach specific people. We never pick up the phone and think ‘Okay, I need to talk to every person on Earth. What ’s the number?’ We don’t send an email to everybody in the company every time we have a thought to share with Sandy in accounting.
When we start any new marketing campaign we need to first think about who the campaign is trying to reach. What is the ultimate goal? What is the campaign saying? What obstacles can get in the way of the right consumer receiving the message? What should the consumer do to take advantage of the offer?
In the past mass marketing has represented the ultimate delivery mechanism for advertising messages but paints the audience with such a broad brush that its goal of reaching the right people can’t be efficiently kept. To be truly effective, a delivery system has to reach the greatest number of individual consumers who can take action on the message being sent.
The bottom line is that a message that reaches 1,000,000 of the wrong people isn’t more effective than a message that reaches a single right person.
The ultimate goal of effective advertising is to maximize effectiveness while reducing waste. Correctly targeting a campaign means first identifying who the best people to receive a particular offer are and how to go about identifying where they are.
When we target online audiences that are three primary areas of exploration:
1. Contextual targeting
2. Database targeting
3. Behavioral targeting
Let ’s take a closer look at the differences between these three areas.
Contextual Targeting
The simple definition for contextual targeting is the placement of messages where the people most likely to be interested are most likely to see it. Contextual targeting is perhaps the oldest type of targeted marketing. For years, trade magazines, area newspapers, local television stations and local radio stations have served as channels for contextual marketing campaigns.
Because each channel caters to a specific range of the population either based on topic interest or region, advertising using contextual targeting has generally meant reaching an audience that has already been ‘filtered’ down to a common interest or locale.
In online marketing, contextual marketing works in a similar way. Many web sites focus on, or have sections that focus on a single or limited range of topics. Like trade publications, these sites attract a self-selected audience who share a common interest whether its butterfly collecting, paintball battlefield strategies or exploring the validity of UFO sightings. For advertisers looking to communicate with these specific groups, good targeting is as easy as placing topically relevant ads on those pages.
Demographic Targeting
Demography covers a broad range of ways a population can be sliced up to define certain segments. A few of the more traditional segments include:
• Age/ Lifecycle
• Gender
• Race/Ethnicity
• Socioeconomic status
• Location of residence
• Religion
• Nationality
• Occupation
• Education level
• Family size
• Marital status
• Ownership (of home, boat, car, etc.)
• Language
While many of these characteristics can effectively narrow a population down into an audience, traditional demography often offers just a generalized benchmark of behavior.
For example, I currently live in a fairly rural part of the country. While I share a number of demographic characteristics with other people within my particular zip code (middle aged, white, own my own home, went to college, married, speak English, or a variant thereof) those benchmarks do a lousy job at identifying us as a whole or me as an individual. My little town runs the gamut of religious and spiritual beliefs, political leanings, socioeconomic levels, education and what ’s considered a fun way to spend a Saturday evening. In short, we share very few characteristics as a population apart from our choice to live in the same part of the country.
For marketers trying to reach ‘us’ based solely on where we live, the results of any geographically targeted campaign are going to be just about as untargeted as you can get.
To reach a more refined group of people based on attributes that aren’t as generalized as most demographic groups, marketers need to find ways to measure ‘who’ consumers are instead of ‘what’ they are.
Here are a few more recent targeting approaches that marketers are using to reach highly refined audiences.
Psychographic Targeting
For marketers to effectively target any audience they need to have a clear understanding of the personal interests that the target audience shares. Social scientists categorize this segmentation as the study of psychographics. Psychographics are commonly defined as individual attributes directly relating to personality, values, interests or lifestyles. There are sometimes referred to as IOA variables or characteristics (for Interests, Attitudes and Opinions). Psychographics often target the most personal parts of who we are.
We belong to multiple psychographic ‘groups’ based on our interests as individuals. Our relationship with each group ranges from little involvement to whole involvement. For example, I may take my bicycle out for a short spin on a warm summer day. This action classifies me as a bicyclist and helps me to identify with other people who enjoy riding bicycles. However, my involvement in this group is very different from the guy who’s training for an upcoming Tour de France and spends 6 hours a day on his bicycle. My identity with bicycling is one of enjoyable weekend pastime while for the guy in training it ’s almost on par with being a lifestyle. If given the opportunity to purchase bicycling paraphernalia I’m going to have a different perspective as to its value and necessity than he will.
Marketers looking to reach a thin-sliced audience need to understand common shared traits and how individuals in these groups ‘weigh’ their interests in these areas. Whether targeting deer hunters, urban dwellers, backgammon players, people of Scotch-Irish descent, unicyclists or guys who mow their lawns on Saturday morning, the value of each psychographic slice is going to depend on how the people in these segments define themselves.
Technographic Targeting
Online targeting is often restricted by technological limitations that prevent marketers from reaching consumers. For marketers to effectively reach consumers it ’s often necessary to know where potential obstacles or bottlenecks exist.
Technographic targeting focuses on identifying the technological foundations that consumers are using to connect with the Web. This includes things like computer CPU speeds, Internet connection speeds, Operating Systems, browser types, browser versions, and drivers or extra software availability.
A common example of technographic targeting is measuring the online bandwidth capabilities of a visitor to a web site. For example, if, as a marketer, I wished to send a video based ad to my target audience I’m going to want to know if they can receive the ad. While broadband adoption over recent years has made this task easier, there are still millions of people worldwide who are using dial-up modems to get online. Without knowing how my target audience accesses the web, I run the risk of wasting impressions by sending ad content to people who can’t receive it.
On the other hand, by measuring the connect speed of my target audience, I can then sort that audience out into sub-groups and provide separate ad units for each group.
Technographic measuring can also tell marketers a lot about a potential customer. A high-tech company looking to introduce a new cutting edge product can effectively target prospects by measuring the operating system on the recipient ’s computer. Prospects running the most recent versions of Windows or the Macintosh OS might be classified as being technologically savvy while prospects still running Windows 98 on a 7 year old PC are probably not good candidates for marketers looking to reach ‘early adopters’.
Centrographic Targeting
While geographical targeting is generally considered part of standard demography there are a few variations that fall outside of the basic geographic targeting realm. Whereas most geographic targeting focuses on regions and areas of the country and world based on their proximately to one another, centrographic targeting focuses more on population characteristics that can be associated with specific regions.
For example, every winter across the Northern United States there is a need for snow removal services. There is also a need for services like heating system maintenance, fuel delivery and sales of things like ice scrapers and snow tires. Meanwhile, in the Southwestern United States the need for these services or products each winter is very limited or non-existent. On the other hand, the hot summers in the Southwest requires air conditioning and home cooling services that are not always necessary in the North.
Centrographic targeting can also identify and isolate differences between population groups. For example, people living in a city like New York are going to have a different perceived need for products and services than people living a few hours north in rural New York might. Even staying within the boroughs of New York, the cultural diversity of different ethnic groups alone makes for dozens of unique regional markets.
Significant differences can also exist among cultural groups that share a similar language and history, or current geography. For example, Hispanic populations living in Southern California and those living in Southern Florida may share common cultural histories and ancestry but represent very unique markets based on unique regional characteristics.
While reaching those audiences requires a new layer of understanding on the parts of marketers, if used correctly the ability to reach more of the right consumers with any marketing offer is also going to result in greater effectiveness and much less waste.
Rob Graham