Small Brands Need More Than Broad Targeting for a Sales Lift

By Paul Turner, Co-Founder, DeepSync Labs

The Value of Purchase-Based Targeting for Small and Medium-sized Businesses’s Social Advertising

The world’s largest social media platforms are powered by advertising, with clients ranging from the most recognizable brands to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). With millions of SMB advertisers using these platforms, they greatly outnumber the larger brands.

In social media environments with hundreds of millions of users, selecting which people to serve your ads to is a critical piece of the puzzle. When you show your ads to buyers who are not likely to ever purchase your product, it is wasteful. SMBs generally have small ad budgets and feel the pressure to invest their dollars prudently, so using more efficient ways of audience targeting is important. This is when audience targeting powered by third-party data is appropriate, and why SMBs need to master it. 

Audience targeting on social media can often be limited, by default, to only the information that users have provided the platform. This is called first-party data, or native audiences. While first-party data is very useful, it is not always the most suitable targeting method to find your consumer packaged goods (CPG) buyers and generate a return on ad spend (ROAS). For smaller players in the CPG and retail industries, being limited to only using native audiences can be a huge disadvantage. Discerning CPG brand preferences, purchase frequency and volume, or loyalty information is simply not possible when only using social media signals.  

For SMBs who may lack the ad budgets, strategic partnerships, technology vendors and testing capabilities of larger organizations, effectively deploying their ads to the right target audiences is a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. We, at DeepSync Labs, are pleased to be collaborating with NCSolutions to help level the playing field for small- to mid-size CPG and retail advertisers in this regard.    

As NCS’s research has shown, purchase-based targeting can be highly effective at increasing ROAS—driving three times the ROAS than other targeting methods—through both loyalty marketing and new customer acquisition. And through our partnership, we’re pleased to be helping NCSolutions make its capabilities easily available to advertisers of all sizes.

Interested in exploring CPG purchase-based audience segments for your business? Browse NCS segments on DeepSync Labs for free.