Why are targeted ads still so terrible?
As the FT points out, big tech has so much data on us, surely ad targeting should be good by now?
The real solution to increasing your chances of reaching the right people isn’t marketing automation, it’s user experience. One’s a tactic, the other’s a strategy.
After all, if even Facebook struggles to identify audience interests with any degree of accuracy, what hope do more limited platforms have?
The risk isn’t just that you’re wasting your paid media spend on micro-targeting, it’s that you’re wasting your production budget producing multiple variants of marketing content for audiences that may never see your material. It’s lose-lose.
The magic bullet isn’t audience segmentation in promotion plans – it’s focusing on your audiences’ interests in the content and messaging development phase. This helps ensure what you’re saying (and how you’re saying it) can appeal to multiple target groups at the same time – from niche to broad. Then you can let your audiences self-select the next step on their customer journey via clear signposting of where to go to find what they want.
One size may not fit all perfectly, but with a skilled tailor one size can be given the *illusion* of fitting all. People will pay attention to the things they’re interested in, not the things they aren’t. Which makes people far more capable of deciding what’s relevant to them than any algorithm.