Psychographic targeting for the poor man – Cambridge analytica without cash #blogg100

So, I am sure you’ve heard about Cambridge Analytica and the way that they helped Donald Trump achieve victory in the US presidential election.

Now, most of us aren’t billionaires and most of us don’t have connections like Steve Bannon. Yet, most of us would like to deliver relevant ads to people based on the values that they have been taught since they were kids. There is no need to weep. I have a partial solution that fits, even the poorest of advertisers out there. I call it “The poor mans hack to psychographic targeting”.

I won’t explain how I figured this one out more than that my dear friend Subhendu was working on a project in Indonesia and found a way to determine who had new phones in Google Analytics. A new phone indicated that the person was rich and thus you could set your website to target such traffic with a higher price point than people using old phones.

Going back to Europe, where most people are rich in comparison, and money has very little to do with what phone you have, I took this technique and tried to figure out what an old versus a new phone would say about people living in our economies.

My hypothesis was that people with a new phone were more keen on changing. They liked the new and they were willing to take a risk to get the latest. People with old phones, however, were people who weren’t willing to take a risk and weren’t willing to change, just because there was something new out there. It was, in other words, a group that didn’t like risk.

Finding Conservatives & Opportunistic people to target
In the hunt for achieving things within limited budgets, I used this hypothesis to derive two types of psychological profiles. One which was opportunistic and was willing to embrace change, and one which was conservative and didn’t want to embrace change. The opportunists liked the new, the latest and all the opportunities it would give them. The conservatives hated change and liked to feel comfort, security and embraced their habits.

If I was to convert an opportunist, I knew I needed to convince them that the product I was selling was going to make them invincible, hot and socially attractive. To convert conservatives, on the other hand, I understood that I needed to make them feel safe, secure and that the thing they changed to, would be frictionless and with full support.

From this hypothesis I created two sets of copy. One which was conservative and one which was opportunistic. Based on the values and the motivations I believed the two groups would have.

I put my hypothesis to the test in three different verticals.

Unsurprisingly enough, I found that I experienced little to no change in the conversion rates for the opportunistic group. At least not statistically significant to the change in copy. I explained this by noticing that we have always been writing copy for this group.

For the conservative group however, we experienced a surge in conversion rates. Unprecedented by all other experiments we had run. When analyzing why, we understood that this was the group who had never had an ad written to them in their whole life. Except, for perhaps, safety products.

I haven’t tried this in more than the three verticals I have had the opportunity to do so, but I suggest that you try it out.

This is how to do it the simplest way:

1. Create a custom audience in Facebook based on customer emails you have lost, or based on the emails you have collected in some sort of lead page campaign or newsletter campaign – ie. create a custom audience of emails you don’t have a billing relationship with today (check if legal to do this before proceeding)
2. Create a lookalike audience based on your custom audience
3. Segment your lookalike audience based on what model of mobile they use and based on operating system (this can be done through ads manager)
4. Target old mobiles (iphone 5s and earlier) with conservative copy and target later mobiles with opportunistic copy
5. Create two different landing pages for the two different target groups
6. Press play and watch your conversion rates 🙂

That’s the poor man’s version of psychographic targeting.

Enjoy!