Meta’s approach of targeting a wide audience may initially seem attractive, but if not implemented thoughtfully, it can negatively impact your advertising performance. I, as the CEO of a professional education company, have directly experienced this while managing campaigns for our Generative AI in Modern Marketing program.
Initially, we opted for Facebook’s recommended “go broad” targeting strategy, leading to an audience size of 4.5 million individuals in Sri Lanka. Despite this extensive reach, we encountered underwhelming conversion rates. Upon reassessment, I recognized that our niche program was ill-suited for such a sizable audience, prompting a revision of our targeting settings.
The Reality of Niche Audiences.
The AI marketing program is designed with approximately 50,000 marketers in Sri Lanka as the target audience. However, our strategy to reach 4.5 million people led to a rapid depletion of our ad budget. This approach resulted in serving impressions to most individuals who demonstrated little to no interest in the program.
At a broad level, the algorithms used by Facebook were unable to effectively target our specific audience among the millions of users on the platform. As a result, we ended up spending money on impressions that failed to reach the 50,000 niche prospects we were aiming for. This led to wasted resources and ineffective marketing efforts.
The Goldilocks Principle of Audience Sizing.
The solution was to significantly tighten our audience size without going so narrow that we excluded interested prospects. We found the “sweet spot” was narrowing down to around 400,000 to 500,000 people in our targeting through the use of relevant interests, demographics, behaviours, and other parameters.
At this level, Facebook was much more likely to capture and serve our ads effectively to our target audience of 50,000 marketers. This allowed our budget to be spent efficiently reaching the right prospective students.
Within days of implementing this audience-sizing strategy, our campaign performance improved dramatically. After 18 days of zero enrollments under the previous “go broad” targeting, we started seeing conversions again.
Contextual Targeting Is Key While “go broad” may work well for products with mass consumer appeal like e-commerce, it fails for niche professional offerings like ours. There’s no one-size-fits-all audience strategy that works across all businesses and verticals.
You need to analyze your specific target audience size and characteristics to determine the right level of audience broadness for effective ad delivery. What’s too broad for reaching a niche audience could be too narrow for a mainstream consumer product.
Don’t blindly follow popular rules of thumb. Test different audience sizing strategies systematically and let your performance data guide your targeting approach. With the right aud ience sizing, your campaigns can be successfully delivered to your ideal prospective customers without waste.
