💣 How I learned to stop worrying and love broad targeting…

For years we’ve relied on deeper and deeper micro-targeting to drive paid social ROI.

So this may sound like heresy… but… content and creative matter way way more than targeting for DTC brands in 2023.

Marketers can be their worst enemy — we love complexity.

But more often than not, precise targeting increases cost and hinders the algorithm.

👕 Take True Classic, the well known DTC T-shirt brand.

They surpassed $100M in revenue and reached profitability in two years.

They spend over $100,000 daily on Meta ads alone.

But guess what?

🚫 They do almost no targeting.

According to Ben Yahalom, President…

“Creative is the new targeting.”

“What I mean by targeting is when an advertiser goes into a platform and essentially circles for the machine who it should or shouldn’t reach on my behalf.”

True Classic doesn’t do any of that.

Instead, the company trusts that if the creative is developed well, it will naturally find the right audience.

“If I put out a piece of UGC female creative, I don’t need to tell the machine to go and hit all the females, it just naturally skews that way. We control for how to hit different audiences by developing creative that we believe is very likely to resonate with those audiences.”

“ If you were to ask me five years ago, I would have said it’s all about micro-targeting, interest targeting, lookalikes. But when you open up this kind of broad approach, the machine does the targeting for you.”

And their conviction has been put to the test….

🧪 In side-by-side tests, where True Classic compared super-targeted campaigns to those with a broader focus, the broader approach consistently outperformed the highly targeted one.

It’s proved to be much more cost-effective, which is a major key as acquisition costs continue to soar.

“When you get very narrow on targeting it tends to get more and more expensive. Now arguably, if you go after your own audience, there is a decent assumption that those might be more qualified leads or more likely to purchase, but what people forget is that it also gets very expensive to reach them. Let’s say they’re 2X as likely to convert, but it costs you 10X as much. It is worth it? Probably not.”

“When you zoom out and open it up, you let the full calculus — how expensive it is to reach them at that point in time, how likely they are to click, how likely they are to purchase, how likely they are to purchase with a basket larger than 100 bucks — be handled by these really smart machines.”

📚 Tl;dr…

⚡Resist the temptation to over engineer.
⚡Make great content.
⚡Makes lots of it so you can test.
⚡And trust the Machine.

Nothing matters more than content and creative. Period.

💸 It’s the single biggest variable within any brand’s control to ultimately drive ROI.

If you want long term sustainable growth, focus on that, not complex targeting or the latest growth hack.