VKontakte targeting: what is it, in simple words

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Targeting VKontakte - why you need it and how to use it

There is no point in advertising if it is shown to the wrong people, at the wrong place. You can see an increase in visitors to the site, which will not affect sales in any way. And all because of the fact that women will be shown ads for shaving creams, and men - shower gel scrub with olive oil. To avoid such situations, there is a special mechanism for selecting the target audience. It's called targeting.

How VKontakte targeting works

Let's say you are the owner of a music store in Moscow. In your assortment - gramophones, vinyl records, musical centers for playing CDs. You once created a VKontakte page for your store. There is a small audience that has not been growing for a long time. And you decide to start promoting the group.

The most obvious way is to order advertising. And so you shell out, come up with great ad text. It is seen by social network users. But ... there is no result.
Your money will be spent, but there will be no new orders. The thing is that together with the residents of Moscow, your ad will also be seen by the population of Samara and Kursk. And people under the age of 25 probably won't need to buy a CD player. They just don't know what it is anymore - they've had all their music on digital media for a long time.
The budget is spent, but there is no influx of new customers.

So that money is not thrown to the wind, our ad must be shown to people over 35 years old living in Moscow. It is desirable that they are interested in music. This task is just for targeting your advertising campaigns. By properly organizing ad targeting, you will achieve the following goals:

Here is an example of creating an advertising post that will be displayed in the feed. You can write a good text, accompany it with attachments - photos, audio recordings, videos.


Next is the subject of the announcement. Age restrictions can be set. For example, tobacco products cannot be shown to persons under the age of 18. Next - the most important stage of work. Targeting needs to be done right. To do this, it is important to know your target audience. It is necessary to answer the question in great detail: “Who is interested in my product or service?” There are different methods for determining the portrait of the target audience. You need to research the market, conduct surveys of real customers. Build your buying persona - this is a clear profile of your ideal customer. Marketers give this definition: “This is a reliable customer who constantly buys your products, with a high degree of loyalty to your brand.”

Let's go back to the example from the beginning of the article. Suppose we have collected data about the target audience. Decided on the age of the buyer, his place of residence. The settings will look like this.

The essence of targeting is to personalize a specific person in your audience as much as possible, to cut off those who are not interested in the offer.

In addition to interests, you can narrow the audience even within a particular educational institution. You can show the ad only to graduates of music schools.

You need to be very careful when targeting an audience by interests.

Keep in mind that a person who is interested in music may well be interested in both active recreation and passive movie watching. Many may not indicate any of their interests at all, which means they will not fall into an advertising campaign. Interest targeting only makes sense, for the most part, when you're selling a very specific product.

When filling in the fields, you need to be careful. For example, if you specify "Choi" - it will not be clear which artist you mean. And the ad will be shown to both rock music lovers and those who prefer pop.

For this, personal profile data is used, as well as statistics on the user's activity in groups and applications, his transitions to external sites. This will partially help solve the problem of an empty profile.

Another handy tool is targeting members of certain communities. You can search by groups to find the publics you need and include them in targeting.

A few words about VKontakte retargeting

This is work with a still “hot” audience. For example, with customers who have already made a purchase in your store.

Statistics show that for such an audience, the success of campaigns increases several times in comparison with "cold" clients.

You will need to prepare a list of your customers - their email addresses, phone numbers, VKontakte profile id. You can use all three types of data, separating them with a comma.

An example of how retargeting works. Let's say a user visits a page in your online store that sells cat food. This information is stored, and such a user can be offered, for example, vitamins for his pet.

conclusions

Targeting is an indispensable tool in target marketing. Competent targeting allows you to significantly reduce the cost of advertising campaigns, increase conversion.
There are a large number of different platforms for analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns (Spotlight, OnlyTolk, Cerebro Target and others).

Please note. No matter how great the targeting is, you constantly need to work on a commercial offer. You must offer the consumer the most relevant product that will satisfy all his needs at once. Without this, no matter how you target the audience, there will be no success.