MNI Blog  /  2 minute read

What is Micro-Targeting & How Does it Affect Advertising?

Micro-Targeting is a marketing strategy that uses consumer data and demographics to create unique audience segments. Learn why micro-targeting is a powerful strategy for your advertising campaigns.

Micro-Targeting is a marketing strategy that uses consumer data and demographics to create audience subsets/segments. It’s possible to predict the buying behavior of these like-minded individuals, and to influence that behavior through hyper-targeted advertising. Micro-Targeting is a highly effective advertising campaign tactic.

Micro-Targeting is the love child of predictive analytics and data insights. It is the result of all that precious data you’ve collected.

How Does Micro-Targeting Work in Advertising?

Here’s how it works: an advertising campaign’s end goal is conversion—someone purchasing your product or service. In order to gain additional conversions, you must first analyze the users who have already converted.

To do this, first identify the actions/attributes of the people who have already purchased your product. Next, gather the data about them: their age, location, income, education, etc. Then you can layer on additional attributes, like travel enthusiasts, pet owners, gamers, or whatever other traits are attached to consumers in the larger audience.

Go Deep into your Big Data for Segmenting

Identifying and overlapping these specific characteristics will create precise segments of your larger audience, which you can use to identify other, like-minded consumers who share those particular traits. And just like that, you’ve built a new audience of potential customers who share similar consumer shopping trends of people who have already purchased your product or service.  Micro-targeting is quality over quantity, and an example of how marketers can use data to predict which consumers are most likely to convert.

The Payoff of Micro-Targeted Advertising

Now, you can focus a portion of your digital dollars on this micro-targeted audience, reaching a niche market with relevant messaging. It’s consumer-first marketing—the opposite of the spray and pray strategy—and exactly what advertising campaigns need to connect with ad-weary consumers in a personal way.

Micro-targeting gives marketers big data, which can be used to create such a comprehensive audience profile that they can not only deliver their messages to consumers who will be most receptive to them, but they can even deliver those message on the audience’s preferred device. This plays a major role when it comes to optimizing campaigns for cross-device targeting.

Why Political Campaigns Need Micro-Targeting

Political campaigns have learned a lot about micro-targeting from retail advertising campaigns. Using voter information (whether or not you voted, and when), political campaign strategists can layer on additional information collected mostly from surveys—demographics, occupation, memberships, political and charitable contributions, etc.—to develop niche audiences. Then, based on known characteristics and behaviors, they can extrapolate the opinions and voting habits of these segments. Political strategists use this information to connect their message with specific individuals who are most likely to support their candidate, but don’t. Yet. Popular—and successful—in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, micro-targeting reached a fever pitch in the 2016 election cycle.  Credited with influencing and inspiring voter turnout in several key states, it’s a powerful tool to help get every dollar out of their ad budgets, by ensuring that campaigns are sending relevant messaging to voters.

Data-backed tactics can save a lot of wasted ad dollars by connecting your message with consumers who are most likely to respond to your message. Give micro-targeting a try!

With in-house campaign management solutions, MNI can provide actionable insights for all of your advertising campaign needs.