February 27, 2020
Say, you want to advertise your kickstarted, redwood-embossed suitcase made from a titanium-weave shell that’s reinforced with Kevlar, because why would it not be? It’s the next step in suitcase technology, with a built-in sound system and paper shredder. To top it off, it looks pretty swanky. You’re aiming for the moon, trying to reach as many people as possible across the globe. Where do you even start?
The right audience
Well, you’re probably looking at targeting a very specific audience. C-Suites in the richest of countries, perhaps. By GDP, you’re looking at the US, China, Japan, Germany and India, then onwards as needed. Even better, someone in your company has taken the time to put a list together, detailing the specific companies that have expressed interest in the C-SuiteCase (patent pending). Everything is shaping up to be a specific, well-targeted campaign.
Audience woes
Yet, when you go to set up your various creatives across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you realise that dividing these audiences up is going to present some challenges. Since you are targeting audiences from multiple countries, each one needs to be tailored to that country – only, many companies these days are global, especially the ones from the list your handy co-worker has prepared. While you might want to target US c-suites from, say, HSBC, for whatever reason you don’t believe the HSBC audience in Germany is interested. Social platforms can’t easily differentiate between the two, resulting in audience overlap that will lead to you wasting valuable advertising funds on the wrong audience.
The solution
So, how do we solve this? On LinkedIn it’s pretty simple – most companies set up country-specific LinkedIn accounts, meaning you can probably get away with targeting all countries in one campaign. It’ll take a bit of research to find each geographically relevant LinkedIn company account, but it will save a significant hassle as you’d otherwise be trying to manage five different ad campaigns at the same time, each with the same creatives set up for multiple phases. Managing the budget becomes a nightmare, as any change will have to be factored into each campaign individually – and don’t even mention trying to change the objective halfway through.
Truth be told, LinkedIn is the main issue here, as you cannot set up different ad sets within one campaign. In Facebook and Twitter, you’ll have to create an ad set for each country. It’ll lead to a lot of double work, as you’ll have to set up all the creatives over and over, but the end result will be a neat, targeted campaign.
Most frustratingly, you might find that the targeted ad sets you’ve created are actually too niche to stand alone within each ad set. At that point, the only solution might be to put everything back together under one ad set after all – painful, I know. At the end of the day, you’ll know your targeted list inside and out, and you might find that you’ve made some observations along the process that will lead to improved returns for your business. Good luck!