Audience segmentation: The most available way to increase the effectiveness of your ads.

“The right message, to the right person, at the right time”. This is what all automotive dealership advertisers strive for. Get these things right, and you’ll be able to create advertising campaigns that are incredibly performant. Get them wrong and you’ll be spending your advertising money with limited results.

Obviously, like many things in life, achieving this is much harder than it sounds.

Luckily, with modern CRMs and “lookalike audiences” identifying the “right person” and sending a tailored message is now much easier to do than ever before with audience segmentation.

Defining your audience segments.

What’s really interesting about audience segmentation is that an advertiser can actually segment their audience by almost any attribute. Male/Female? City/Rural? Age Group? Household income? The options can actually be pretty daunting.

However, the answer to ‘what to segment’ is sometimes a pragmatic one. Remember, for each audience segment, you must create a tailored message and an ad set that conveys this message – otherwise, the advantage of segmenting an audience would be nullified. So the more you segment the more ad sets you will need to create. Monetarily speaking, each ad set would require a significant enough budget to create an impact.

As a result, the best way work/reward segmentation we have found for automotive dealers is to segment their audiences is by vehicle type – like SUVs, Trucks, Sedans, Coupes etc.

This ensures that:

1. We have enough audience separation to that tailoring different ad messages would affect ad performance.
   – and –
2. We don’t’ create so many segments that our ad creative sets that it becomes unmanageable.

How to create and use audience segments in your advertising

I know what you’re thinking:

“Segment my audience based on interests in my SUVs, Sedans, and Trucks. Got it! I’ll just go to Google or Facebook and select those audience interests”.  

Not so fast. While selecting “SUV’s” or “Trucks” interests may be easy, it’s not the most effective way to fill your audience.

To populate your audience groups with an optimized audience, you will need to mine your CRM data for customers that have bought within these segments and then create ‘lookalike’ or ‘similar’ audiences based on this data.

In fact, some of our statistics have shown that audience groups created via CRM ‘lookalike’ have outperformed audiences which are simply selected via Facebook or Google’s interest selection.

We, marketers, are always striving to get closer to the goal of “The right message, to the right person, at the right time”. And by properly segmenting your audience by vehicle type and populating it with existing customers from your CRM, we can move one step closer to our goal.