Today’s society is really about more. More bang for your buck, more Twitter followers, more customers, more updates. Unfortunately, the answer to more money, more conversions and more profits isn’t always more. It’s better. Sometimes instead of focusing on casting a wider net and bringing in a small percentage of a large (unlikely to convert) population, you need to focus on a smaller, more appropriate audience. In most cases, you’ll get a better return on your time and effort by cutting down the number of people you pitch or contact, even online.

Proper targeting and segmentation is one of the biggest inefficiencies in marketing and advertising. It is extremely important to increase your customer base while maintaining (or increasing) your rate of conversion. Otherwise, you quickly waste money by expending energy and time on non-profitable consumers. Due to the relative ease of mass social media marketing, many marketers mistake the ability to appeal to the largest audience possible as a necessity. Because, “why not”? The reason is there are costs (even online) of time, effort and resources that add up and could be better spent targeting customers better to increase conversions rather than building up the base that you’re pitching.

Case Study: Twitter

Twitter is the most prescient example of marketers who choose to cast a wide net rather than targeting. For the majority of marketers, the end goal is one number: how many followers do you have? Not only is that number the wrong metric, but it’s the wrong approach.

Take @BlueMoonBurgers, a local Seattle burger joint. It is unrealistic to think that Blue Moon could convert anyone out of the Washington (or at least Pacific Northwest) area into a sale or consistent customer. Spending time pitching those users would be crazy, and a waste of time. Yet if you scroll down the list of their 800+ followers, it’s clear that at least 20% (conservatively) are not from the area. A list of 650 Seattle-based followers is actually more relevant (and profitable) to Blue Moon than an 800 person list, 20% of whom are unlikely customers.

What it Costs You, and What You Can Do

Blue Moon Burgers does not actually spend its time trying to add these followers from places like London and Arizona. But there are thousands of individuals and companies that go around following everyone they can and replying to everyone possible just to increase their number of followers, regardless of whether they are a possible conversion. I’m sure you can name quite a few yourself. Sure, you never know where you’ll get your next conversion from, but doesn’t it make more sense to spend your time trying to pitch customers with a much higher likelihood for conversion?

Every hour you spend on a campaign that targets the wrong users, or dollar you spend advertising on an irrelevant website cuts into your profits. Find better customers and you will maximize your resources and improve your profits. Every time.

So how do you find those “better” customers? You know your customer better than anyone else. If you’re making t-shirts for 20-somethings, you have no reason to target baby boomers (unless you’re looking for gifts for said 20-somethings). If you’re a local art gallery, you should be targeting people locally, not halfway across the globe.

You can target your customers on any platform. With Twitter, you can use geolocation services or Twitter Search. On advertising platforms, unless you’re Coca-Cola, you shouldn’t be targeting *everyone*, you should be looking for your own potential customers. A yarn company wouldn’t advertise on TechCrunch in the same way that Major League Baseball wouldn’t advertise during a soap opera. It’s the wrong audience.

Targeted advertising is the best way to increase clickthroughs and conversions through an ad – find the right place, or right segment, first and foremost. Sometimes when an ad fails, it doesn’t mean the messaging or the product is bad, sometimes it’s just pitched to the wrong person. It really helps to do in-depth evaluations of all your marketing campaigns.

What We’re Doing

In case you didn’t already know, Viralogy is doing its own part to help companies segment and target their visitors. A little over a 2 weeks ago, we allowed users to vote on what direction we would take with the Viralogy platform. They chose Viralogy Dynamic Insights, a platform designed to increase conversions by optimizing websites dynamically for visitors using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). If you’d like to learn more about how our API can help your customers, we’d love for you to contact us.

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