You can’t be everything to everyone, but you can make a big impact on a very specific type of person — your target audience. The key to maximizing your marketing resources and efficiently monetizing your audience is hypertargeting your campaigns to reach the right people, at the right time, on the right channel. Instead of allocating your ad spend to target users for whom your product or service is irrelevant, use people-based data to inform your efforts and watch your ROI surge.
A New Kind of Targeting
Most publishers are familiar with at least the general idea of targeting. Learning about your target audience’s wants, needs, lifestyles, and characteristics help paint a picture of who is reading your content and buying your products and services. The problem is that the picture traditional cookie- and web-based targeting paints are incomplete or even erroneous.
Conventional targeting approaches look through user data to find out information like gender, age range, and geography, but these are all guesses. You may be able to determine whether target users are 20-somethings or middle-aged, but it’s difficult to pinpoint specific birthdates. Same goes for profession, hometown and so on. This is especially common when you have multiple people sharing one device, so you get a single data stream representing the habits of several users.
Even single-use devices generate problematic data due to a lack of context. Without a detailed profile, we’re forced to make assumptions — like, “all men like motorcycles” or “all women shop for makeup” — but building a monetization strategy on the back of assumptions is a risky endeavor.
Email targeting isn’t really new, but many marketers are seeing it in a new light for the first time.
You’ve been relying on tracking for so long that you’ve forgotten the power and depth of subscriber-based data, but mining your subscriber list (and viewing that information in the context of cross-channel behavior and engagement) results in far more relevant and valuable data with oodles of context.
What Is Hypertargeting?
Hypertargeting takes data mining and the creation of a customer profile even further. It’s not about gathering more data so much as it’s about gathering better data. With hypertargeting, you dig deeper and expand your understanding, forming a complete picture of a specific user tied to a specific email.
Many publishers are already tracking user behavior across multiple platforms. Link an email to that individual and you now have a unique identifier with which you can follow that user as they hop from their inbox to social media to Google and beyond. Instead of basing your segmentation on speculation, you’re steadily building up a thorough narrative that speaks to exactly who this person is, where they go, what they do, how they like to relax, where they work, what music they like to listen to, how many times they’ve stopped by your virtual storefront, which blog titles caught their attention and so on.
Every time the person linked to that email takes action via the internet, you’re able to refine and further personalize their profile. You truly get to know them and are therefore able to deliver content that makes sense. Customers feel that rapport, too, and it makes them exponentially more likely to feel appreciated — a great way to instill loyalty and trust.
Using Hypertargeting
Once you’ve identified your hypertargeted audience, you can segment your ad spend for incredible efficiency and ROI. Studies show that audiences tolerate ads far better when those ads are relevant, engaging and meaningful. Consumers want content that’s useful to them; ads that only take the brand’s needs into account are not only tone-deaf, but they’re also downright irritating. Hypertargeting allows you to focus on a few precisely targeted ads that speak to your core demographic.
Hypertargeting also fuels smarter, more authentic third-party ad initiatives. Ad networks that rely on outdated targeting methods (either their own data or info you provided) run the risk of populating your content with low-brow or completely off-base ads your audience may find distasteful or confusing. The culprit? Poor targeting. The victims? Your audience and your brand. The audience is turned off and your brand loses esteem and authority because you’re no longer delivering the type of content you promised.
Email-fueled hypertargeting provides accurate information that helps ensure your brand safety not only within your own organizational structure but on whatever channels you choose to incorporate into your wider monetization strategy.
In short, hypertargeting wins on five levels:
- Build consumer trust
- Greater personalization for users based on click behavior
- More accurately target people
- Multi-device coverage/tracking
- Publisher control
Together, those five benefits of hypertargeting turn your weekly newsletter or email promotions into monetization powerhouses. You’re no longer papering the universe with one-size-fits-no-one ads that fall flat and drain your bank account until it’s bone dry, you’re capitalizing on meticulously configured user profiles to match each subscriber with the targeted ad that suits them best.
It’s like magic, except it’s better because you’re able to control and replicate the results. Whether you’re looking to build new audiences or retain your existing ones, hypertargeting is the best tool for crafting personalized experiences that resonate.
No matter what size your business is or where you are in your life cycle, our digital monetization ecosystem can help drive revenue and provide proven, measurable results.
To see our impressive monetization tool in action, speak to our experts today.
