I saw an interesting commercial on TV. It was during a sports event — and the ad was definitely targeted to sports fans.
Change the channel. Now I’m watch- ing a poker game – and the same com- mercial comes on. But this time it’s targeted at poker players. Impressive!
Will it work again? Sure enough. I’m over on the Sci-Fi channel — and there it is again! But this time it has a message for Science Fiction fans.
This is a perfect example of targeted marketing. They have matched the message to the market. It’s a match!
You rarely see several variations of a commercial on television advertising. It’s simply too expensive to produce. By the time they pay for the actors, the sets, the film crews, editing, etc. they’ve exceeded any monetary advantage they get from targeted advertising.
So what made this commercial different? They used technology only — no people. Essentially, to change the message to match the market they merely had to change the text and recompile the video. Brilliant! An instantly targeted message.
So what can we learn from this commercial that we can apply on-line?
Personalize your message to the market. For example, if you are running an ad aimed at authors, then send them to a landing page that has a message for authors. Don’t take shortcuts and send them to a generic landing page. If you do, you lose the advantage of the targeted ad.
Template campaigns that can be easily customized. The secret to the ads I mentioned is that they
can quickly and easily customize them. You can do the same with your marketing — maybe creating one audio postcard for authors, another for consultants, another for attorneys. Personalize – with a plan.
