Targeting is losing its power. Now what?

Ad targeting has lost some of its power in the last few years, due in most part to stricter privacy laws and updates such as Apple’s iOS 14 that give users the option to opt out of sharing their data with apps like Facebook.

These changes have diminished the amount of data that ad platforms can collect, leading to ‘signal loss’ which makes targeting less precise than it once was. From a marketing perspective, this means ad campaign targeting is trending to broader audiences as opposed to the super-precise audience segments used in recent times.

On first impression this may sound like a major challenge for brands. But it’s not all doom and gloom, and it could actually be a good thing for brands.

how Brands Grow

When targeting was super precise, brands could enjoy strong ROI from campaigns by spending efficiently on the small subset of people that were most likely to buy their products.

This meant ROAS was high and short term efficiency from marketing campaigns was strong, which all sounds like good news, but the broader picture was that many advertisers were neglecting one of the foundational marketing principles: market penetration.

In the marketing classic ‘How Brands Grow’, Byron Sharp shows that the evidence-led path to brand growth is simple; increasing market penetration by recruiting ever more new brand users into habitual purchase.

Or in other words, in order to drive growth, brands need to reach as many people in the market as possible, continuously, to recruit new customers. When you zoom out, this means broader targeting is better when the goal is to grow your brand.

Going Broad

Meta’s own latest recommendations are to go broad with targeting, with an audience size of over 2 million users being optimal. This is partly because algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting to find people that are most likely to buy, based on a complex web of behavioural cues, but also because in order to grow over time, brands need to continuously reach as much of the market as possible.

With this broader approach to targeting, the quality of ad creative becomes more and more important to campaign success. A side effect of this shift is that more advertisers are trying to reach your audience, and in order to break through the noise and capture the market’s attention, brands need to be smarter with their approach to creative.

Creative Recommendations

Improve your creative game with these tips.

Make it visually engaging: all modern platforms are naturally very visually stimulating, and standards are constantly improving, which means the bar for creative is higher than ever and is only going to rise. Many platforms are becoming more video-centric too, which means high-impact video creative is often the best-performing format.

Grab attention quickly: users spend an average of 1.4 seconds with a piece of content before deciding whether to stick with it or scroll past it. That means the first frame of the video, or the first section of a static ad that users are going to look at will be key for earning attention.

Put the brand up-front and include distinctive assets: even if a user only watches a few seconds, they are still exposed to sensory and semantic cues such as colours, packaging, logo, design, or taglines that make the brand easy to remember and recall.

Connect: highlight a pain point or a reason for the audience to care in order to connect with them.

Go lo-fi on certain channels and placements: lo-fi video, which relies on mobile phone-shot creative by customers, influencers or ambassadors, can perform as well as or even better than studio-produced creative in some placements such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

Be agile based on data and consumer trends: a process that enables your brand to respond quickly to social media trends or performance data, and deliver new creatives based on those insights will lead to more relevant and better-performing creatives. Having a streamlined ‘always-on’ approach to creative development is the answer to having this agility and reactivity, rather than having dedicated ‘projects’ and shoot days intermittently.

If you’d like to learn more or find out how Bumbl can help your brand with its creative needs, contact us here.