Micro-Targeting—The Key to Reaching the Right People

Video Transcript

One of the strategies we recommend our clients use and really try to encourage them to use a lot is this idea of micro-targeting via testimonial. What does that mean? Bunch of words for what?

If you think about the sphere of influence of different people in different communities, we think about how trusted they are for different things, and people take their advice or trust them in the decisions they make because they believe they make wise decisions or good decisions, or they’re well-researched. You think about this idea, and it’s a hot keyword now, but this idea of influencers, and you have these influencers that have huge followings, doesn’t mean they’re well-trusted. It doesn’t necessarily mean that just because I find someone entertaining doesn’t mean that I trust them to determine what type of doctor I should go to, what type of food I should put in my body, or whatever it may be, right?

You’ll have brands that pay these influencers to promote products, but the trust score is dependent on what their target demographic looks like. What is the trust that’s associated with that person for me? Are they an entertainment value? Are they a trusted resource? So thinking through that concept within when you’re using testimonials for your brand or business, whatever it may be, it’s important to think through their spheres of influence within the community, and their trust related to that community – how much people trust them with what they’re talking about.

Let’s say we hire a spokesperson that’s well known within a state, and they speak to our product or service, or endorse us, or whatever it may be. You’ve got a person that’s well known as a public figure in some capacity, but there may not be a lot of trust with that person in general, on a personal level. Now, you think about somebody you know. Think about a teacher of some sort. Think about a family member. Think about someone that’s very highly active and involved in a community in a leadership role, whatever that community may be, you take that person and you put them promoting your product, and when I say promoting, I’m referring to giving a testimonial or getting them on video, just talking about how you helped, and I don’t mean a professional taking it. You could do with your iPhone and post it on social media, but it’s this idea of capturing people that are well trusted in small communities and then promoting those communities.

Let’s think through how to how to practically utilize this. Let’s say you’re a healthcare clinic of some sort, and you perform surgery on a teacher, right? A teacher at a certain school — a well trusted teacher that’s been there for 30 years. Everybody loves them. So you’ve got this teacher and and all this relates back to this idea of how do I best spend our resources from a marketing and advertising perspective? Do I spend them all on one thing, or do I kind of spread it out based on a more targeted approach? And there’s resources beyond money, there’s time commitment, there’s resources from an organizational perspective, but all this being considered if you can get someone who is well trusted within a community, so let’s use the school teacher example, and you get them giving a testimonial about your service, product, or whatever it may be, and then taking that testimonial and promoting it on digital platforms based on people who interact with or engage with or like whatever that platform is.

For instance, let’s say you’re a healthcare clinic, and let’s say there’s a school within your target of influence, and your target demographic is within this geographic radius. There can be several schools, but let’s say there’s one for this example, and there are 2,000 people who go to that school. There are 20,000 people who have ever gone to that school, and there are 30,000 people still located locally within have touched that school in some capacity. Of those people who have a relationship to that school, let’s say you’re from an organic perspective, your social media following is 1,000 of those 30,000 people who follow you, and actively engage with that content. You’ve got these 1,000s. There’s another 29,000 that are untouched, that are within you’ve decided within your target demographic that you want to hit. We could put a generic commercial with some spokesperson or whatever out there, and it will inevitably hit them.

Or we could take someone who’s had some kind of direct influence, likely within their life, put them in front and though they don’t like engage even maybe even know about you from a product or service standpoint, you put that person that they trust in front of them, that they know, right? What do people engage with the most on social media, other people themselves, and other people, right? So if we can, then take that piece of media, piece of content we create. You see it via reviews that are left, and people turn to social media content, and you see it via videos. You see it via a photograph of someone doing something and the review they’ve written about it, whatever it may be. You take that person and then from an advertising perspective, rather than spending $1,000s and $1,000s of dollars targeting this large audience, you take a small audience, this idea of microtargeting, you take $100 bucks and you spend it on within the radius of that school based on people that engage with and like things that are either directly correlated with or tangentially correlated with that school from a digital media perspective. Talking about Facebook as a platform – people that like or engage with this Facebook page or Facebook page like it. And so when I think about a school, I think about every, not only does the school have pages, but so does every organization and sports team and everything else has pages.

One of the things that from a digital advertising perspective, that we always need to keep in mind is digital advertising companies – Facebook, Instagram, X, Twitter, TikTok – all these people, they are incentivized to make your ads work. The more your ads work, the more you’ll spend with them, right? That’s the idea. So they’re trying to figure out smart ways to put your advertisements in front of people that could engage with it and maybe potentially be patients, customers, voters, whatever.

So if we think about this microtargeting, instead of taking this big buy, we take $100 and we take that testimonial we got of that teacher who’s been there for 30 years, and we promote it to people on a digital media platform, let’s say Facebook or Instagram, of people who like or engage with either that school or pages similar to that school, suddenly you’re not promoting to a million people. You’re promoting to so if we think about we start narrowing that audience, 10,000 people, 15,000 people, this smaller audience, but with a very, very high, trusted person. So what are you doing when you scroll through your social media feed, and you see somebody you know? You stop. Or somebody you trust, somebody you really like? You stop. Doesn’t matter what you’re not stopping for, the little logo in the brand, you’re not stopping, not even looking at the caption. You just see that person. Therefore, you stop and start consuming that content. However, that may be, whether you’re reading the captions of the video on silent, whether you’re actually reading the post itself, whether you’re actually opening the video and turning on the volume, but the reason you stopped was because of that person. And how can I then identify who that person has interacted with, influenced the most most trusted by and figured out how to target them, not with my whole advertising budget, but with 100 bucks. And then I take that same concept and I apply it, community by community, not just schools, but different volunteer organizations,  with churches, with just different large bodies of communities, relatively large, so relatively large bodies of communities within different cities or geographic areas.

Find trusted people that genuinely believe in your product or service, genuinely would speak highly of it and get them to do a testimonial, and then put that testimonial out there in front of an audience that is not necessarily just all your target demographic, but it’s the people that they have trust from. So that’s this idea of micro-targeting from a testimonial perspective that we find high value in, and we see high success rates with.