How to Find a New Audience – A Case Study

To master digital display advertising, one of the things you need to understand are your passive and active audiences. Whatever product or service you sell, there are highly likely to be people out there who are already looking for or buying what you have to offer. But there will always be those audiences who have no clue that you exist. Your product or service is not on their radar at all. Both sides of the coin can be equally important in terms of your sales, but both take a very different approach.

If you want to find a brand new audience that you’ve not spoken to before, then it is more likely to be a passive one. Talking to a set of people that are yet to know anything about you isn’t always that easy, but if you get it right it can open up some great opportunities.

Here is a case study of how we helped a client that was struggling in a competitive environment and so needed to branch out to find success.

About the company

Our client was running a car donation programme in the USA that offered its customers everything they could need from a car donation charity.

Why did they approach Fluid Ads?

The market they were operating in was incredibly competitive. They were struggling to find audiences that they didn’t have to pay a lot for. They were targeting military veterans and we needed to find new ways to approach this market.

How did Fluid Ads help?

One of the major tasks that is vital for any digital display campaign is to really explore your market and your audience. In consultation with our client, we decided to expand our thinking in this way. Rather than focus on the obvious traits that we already knew about, we tried to consider other interests that the target audience might have.

We analysed locations where the veteran programme is strong and found that in these areas (Texas, Ohio, North Dakota and Minnesota), the National Football League (NFL) was the most popular sport. In fact, we could even go as far as to say the locations we found were some of the USA’s most NFL obsessed states.

Using this insight, we managed to unlock a completely untapped passive audience. We began a brand awareness campaign by targeting a list of cherry picked sites to serve the ads on. These were all NFL sites and we upped the CPM (impressions served) to ensure that the adverts were visible in good placements.

What was the outcome?

This campaign proved to be a huge success. Rather than considering the target audience in the most obvious way, we used our creative thinking to connect with a greater proportion of the audience, reaching out to veterans that would never have known about the charity otherwise.

The NFL campaign now equates to 50% of all the car donations that we generate on behalf of our client. What’s more, this audience has the lowest cost per donation, so it exceeded the requirements that the client was looking for.

There is a huge amount of scope here as NFL content is nearly endless and for this reason the CPM is low.

The success of this campaign has very much led to the growth of the passive audiences, who can be identified as people who match the profile of the target market through their likes and dislikes. This puts less priority on the active audiences who were proving too costly to target due to the competitive nature of the market.

Combining the power of human logic alongside programmatic display technology meant we were able to gain greater results than would have been possible if we’d relied on data alone. The two approaches working together can deliver amazing results.

We’d love to help your business find new audiences online and drive sales this year, please book a free demo and chat with the Fluid Ads team today!