Whenever creating a campaign, almost all marketers already know who they want to target. However, I rarely see any of them making a conscious decision about who not to target.
I mean, I get it. It’s pretty natural. Why would we think about who we shouldn’t market our product to? But when it comes to digital marketing, we have to be very specific. This can expedite your learning and optimization much faster.
Excluding Certain Audiences Can Be Even More Crucial
From my experience in the industry for almost a decade, I can tell you that knowing who NOT to target is as important as knowing who to target—if not more!
This may sound like an advertising problem, right? While precise audience targeting is the core of Google Ads, Meta Ads, or even TikTok Ads, the basic logic should be applied to all marketing channels, especially those that require audience segmentation, such as email marketing, mobile app marketing, customer lifecycle marketing, etc.
Let me share my experience so you can avoid making the same mistake I did.
Avoiding Wasted Time, Money, and Effort on the Wrong Audience
In some contexts, you might be marketing products for a specific “gendered” market. Imagine you’re marketing a feminine hygiene product, for starters. Does it make sense to target the male audience? Sure, there might be some husbands out there buying the products for their wives, but I can tell you that they’re the minority here.
And then you drill down again. Should we consider including women over 50 in our pool? Most of them may be in the menopause phase.
The above example is actually the simpler version of the science. However, sometimes it’s pretty vague whom we should exclude.
There are levels of detail you can consider excluding to make sure your campaign is more refined. Think of age, gender, geography, languages, devices, etc. There are many ways to do that, and it’s unique to your business.
Now let’s go to a slightly more complex example.
Uncovering Hidden Intent Behind Keywords in SEM (Google Ads)
I had the honor of helping my sister market her pottery / ceramic business, which primarily produce ceramic tableware in Indonesia for B2B customer overseas.
Given the nature of her business, we decided to target the global audience through SEM, with a focus on product exports.
From there, I found that the closest match keyword to the target is “ceramic manufacturer”, after running the campaign for a couple of weeks turned out there was hidden intent:
| We bid this Keyword | What was typed by the audience | Underlying intent |
|---|---|---|
| Ceramic manufacturer | ceramic plate manufacturer | Manufacturer of ceramic plate |
| Ceramic manufacturer | Ceramic tiles manufacturer | Manufacturer of ceramic floor tile |
Now imagine if we keep our ads running without excluding “tiles” keyword. Of course, leads may come in, but we’ll waste our marketing budget and time digesting leads who are looking for something we don’t even provide in the first place!
Not to mention that generally, SEM optimizes for volume based on the audience’s behavior. Ad platforms don’t care if it’s relevant for you or not; as long as it converts into leads, they think it is performing well.
So that is one example. You should give more context to ad platforms by excluding certain keywords.
How Exclusions Can Improve ROI
I have some relevant experience here, where our product is marketable to nearly all customer types worldwide.
Technically, all audiences who have seen our ad campaigns can sign up through our website and finalize the purchase with a sales representative.
Our lead volume was strong, and our CPL was relatively affordable. However, product purchases are not heading in the right direction as our conversion rate and transaction value are below expectations
We are aware that our customers primarily come from more developed countries such as Singapore, Japan, Germany, the UK, or other parts of Western Europe.
Once we examined the metrics more closely, we found that 50-60% of our spending was allocated toward regions with lower cost of advertising (lower CPM or CPC), such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa, etc.
While it is true that we have a considerable size of customers from that region, the value is not as significant as the ones that come from the primary audience.
After excluding these low-converting regions, we see an increase in few aspects:
- Non-responsive/junk leads reduced drastically
- Higher potential transaction value (customer’s budget)
- Average conversion from leads to purchase also increased
In a nutshell, targeting the broader market might not always bring in “broader” results, especially in terms of value.
Of course, you may think that it’s important to generate as many leads as possible, so you’re focusing on areas with a high population in the hopes that they’ll provide additional revenue streams.
The truth is, there should be a fine tune between quantity vs quality (value). Sometimes, you’ll need to take the risk of excluding a specific audience.
And yes, the number of leads may suffer, but isn’t the point of your campaign to generate conversions or sales? So focus on the ones who will actually take you there.
Closing Remarks
So yes, excluding a certain audience may not be as straightforward or obvious. It takes some rocket science, but it is equally important to define who is your ideal target audience.
Sometimes, marketers are not “brave enough” to exclude some specific audience. Yes, I understand, it feels like you’re losing them. But why should you care? When they don’t in the first place!
Perhaps, you probably don’t know that audience exclusion helped me save tons of ad budgets and wasted hours on chasing low-intent buyers. The more you know, and that’s why I’m sharing this with you!
This method worked well for me, and hopefully, it works well with you, too…
And that you’ll think of more creative or out-of-the-box approaches that will fire up your marketing engine – be it in SEM or other marketing channels.
PS: Would love feedback to my writing, feel free to reach out at faisal.tirtonady@gmail.com