What is Targeting?
If you haven’t read our previous post about modeling, go back and check it out! But how do we go from a model to actually finding the right women to connect with? That’s called targeting!
Models inform our targeting. They provide the information about people (e.g., traits, attitudes, barriers, values, opinions, some demographic information) that is used to determine who will see our ads online. If a tangible analogy helps, you can think of our model like a filing cabinet of information we’ve learned about our audience. Files for values, files for traits, files for survey responses, files for consumer data like what they watch on Hulu. . .At this point we’re not talking about individual real people, we’re talking about more abstract types of people.
Models always produce a larger possible audience than one would actually want to use. For example, we focus on moderate women. We aren’t interested in changing anyone’s core beliefs, so it only makes sense to connect with people who are likely to be open-minded. By removing folks on both extremes, we’ve already pared it down a fair bit. Targeting is the strategic process by which we narrow down which groups of women we’ll connect with.
We want to connect with people who want communities and a country that will work for everyone, so we are choosing folks who share the values that support that vision. Our strategic experts make many complicated decisions about who to reach and who not to reach. They comb through that imaginary filing cabinet and use it to plan their next steps. At the end, they have something like a small Rolodex to go with that big cabinet. From here, we use the information from the model to help build out the programming to effectively connect with the audience we identified (the targets).
To review: Step one was making a model. Step two was making a strategic decision about who to target using information from that model. Step three is finding the groups of people we’ve decided to connect with in the voter file, which means matching our abstract profiles up with real women. Step four is delivering our ads to those women wherever they are online. That’s how an Uncertain Individualist in theory becomes 34-year-old Linda in Pennsylvania who is seeing a message about subsidized childcare between Bob’s Burgers episodes on Hulu, or how a Traditionalist Conservative in theory becomes 57-year-old Barbara in Wisconsin seeing a message about accepting nonbinary people to unlock the Women’s Health article she wants to read.
This information not only allows us to reach the women we seek to connect with, but it also helps Galvanize Action’s partners across the country. We’re always happy to share our unique insights along with the whitelabel ads we give away. For more information about how this process works, contact partnerships@galvanizeaction.org!
