Targeting vegans
How successful advertising on social media is comes down to how much you can tell the platform about the people you want to show your advert to. This is called your ‘audience’. If you’re too generic (for example, if you set your audience as men aged between 20-55 in London) then you’re not going to get very good results. Yes, your customers will be in there somewhere, but you will have spent all your budget on people who are unlikely to buy before finding the ones that will. Fortunately, because you have already made your customer profiles you know exactly who you are targeting. You know their age, where they live, what their job is, what their hobbies are, what other brands they like, when they are likely to be online and a whole host of other information that you can feed into the audience selection, making sure that your advert only gets shown to those types of people who really connect with your product. And you can have a different advert running for each of your customer profiles. Yana the Yoga Instructor will see a photo of your product placed on a yoga mat, whereas Retired Ruby will see it next to a pair of gardening gloves. And I know that this genuinely works because I have done it. When you know what someone is interested in you can use a photo that will make them stop as they are scrolling down the page. How’s your stance on privacy when you realise as an advertiser you are now benefiting from all this creepy information that Facebook collects on its users? Kind of makes you feel a bit dirty doesn’t it? But don’t worry, because we are all ethical vegan companies and we’re using this for the greater good!
How to target vegans is worth taking a deeper look at. For example, on Facebook and Instagram you can select to target someone ‘who has an interest in veganism’. This wording is deliberately vague because the platforms know that these people seem to be vegan, they interact with posts about veganism or might follow vegan pages, but they are not going to guarantee they actually are. The way that digital algorithms work is if you interact with something about a certain topic, a platform will tag you as being interested in that topic and show you more of it. But, ironically, if someone posts angry anti-vegan views on a vegan post, Facebook will show that person more posts about veganism! It assumes this is something they feel passionately about, else why would they comment so much? That’s why you can always have a wry little smile when you see angry anti-vegans commenting on vegan posts – you can think: ‘you’re only making it worse for yourself mate…’
So, sometimes it’s better to not just use a social media’s default option for targeting vegans, or rather don’t use it as the only targeting method. Test other ways of targeting. Even if someone is vegan, Facebook doesn’t know what kind of vegan these people are, they will have just lumped us all together. You might only want to target people who have gone plant-based for fitness, or people are ethically vegan.
Instead, you might want to say to Facebook: set my audience to people who have an interest in veganism AND The Vegan Society. Or people who have an interest in veganism AND follow these vegan fitness pages. And you can keep ‘layering’ to find your particular flavour of vegan, so that you might end up with a really defined audience of vegans who follow The Vegan Society, also like ‘Yoga With Adriene’ and also have an interest in vegan recipes. Try running the same advert with different audience tweaks and look at which gets you the best results.
