Targeting is a potent tool for digital marketers, and the mobile age has only increased the capabilities available for brands seeking to reach their audience with the right message at the right time in the right format. This is especially true for brands dealing with products that have specialist or niche audiences – the connected world means that even the smallest segment of the population can be turned into a targetable audience suitable for a campaign at scale.

This was how Epson approached a campaign for its Colour Light Output Projectors. The audience for such products is relatively small, split between active in-market IT decision markers for B2B marketing, and high-end consumers in the B2C world. An effective campaign for the products would need to identify these audiences and engage them early on in the sales cycle, building a strong brand preference.

“Projectors are a considered purchase; if you think about people with a disposable income and a room big enough to put a projector in, it’s quite a niche audience,” said Mike Dando, EMEA advertising and promotions manager at Epson. “Most people, if you offered them a projector, would probably take it, but it’s not cheap, so you’ve got a small audience in that respect, but also, on your list of things that you might go and spend £500 to £7,000 on, it’s not high enough most people’s lists to be the thing you’re going to go and spend that disposable income on.

“Finding people who are in market, or would even consider getting a projector and spending that kind of money is quite difficult, so that’s why we used Ogury and other partners as well, to try and understand the behaviours that were happening online, and target people based on behaviours that would suggest they were potentially interested in buying a projector, rather than doing a different sort of targeting.”

Epson worked with behavioural planning agency TotalMedia and mobile data platform Ogury to plan a media strategy across 13 campaign markets including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. TotalMedia first used analysis of search signals and social media to understand actual consumer research behaviour in the projector market. From previous campaigns, the firm was aware that using mobile devices was crucial for reaching Epson’s target audience.

While TotalMedia worked with a variety of cross device partners on the campaign, most focused on desktop, while Ogury had a specific focus on mobile, making them crucial to TotalMedia’s strategy. Ogury uses unique 1^st party data from mobile, collected via a proprietary SDK following an explicit user opt-in that enables it to access a comprehensive view of mobile data behaviour. Using this, Ogury and TotalMedia were able to develop 26 bespoke targeting matrixes for the campaign, dividing each geographic market into consumer and B2B audiences.

“Ogury provided us a granular level of data and transparency that allowed us to really understand the behaviour of the Epson audience,” said James Duffy, head of digital at TotalMedia. “This behavioural approach, driven through collaboration, has led to them being a valued partner across Epson activity and the wide agency.”

The targeting matrixes included websites that signalled projector research and buying intent. Using this, Ogury’s intelligent targeting technology analysed the dataset to calculate relevancy scores for each user while cross-referencing this with the campaign objectives. The targeting algorithm then selected only the most suitable in-app ad impressions for each sub-campaign, serving ads to only the users with the highest relevancy scores to maintain high quality post-click results.

This granular targeting also enabled Epson, Ogury and TotalMedia to work together to develop custom ad formats for the campaign, providing users with a personalised experience. The format included a click to bookmark feature, allowing for quick and easy re-engagement for the user directly from their mobile home screen following ad exposure.

“We’ve all skipped ads on TV, we’ve all heard about ad blocking and those kind of things, but an ad is only an ad when it’s not targeted very well and it’s not the right content for you,” said Dando. “If you target people really well, and it’s stuff that they’re interested in, it becomes a piece of useful content, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Ogury’s data created a highly targeted campaign that drove down cost-per-click, and in turn TotalMedia was able to efficiently reach both the in-market consumer and IT decision maker audiences. The mobile campaign, driven by Ogury’s technology, performed significantly better than the desktop focused partners, with cost-per-acquisition 65 per cent lower than the campaign average, and cost-per-time-engaged 55 per cent lower. The mobile click through rate was twice as high as benchmark figures, hitting 19.4 per cent for business users and 20.2 per cent for consumers.

The campaign is an excellent example of how granular level targeting can generate huge results in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, and Epson was highly encouraged by the results.

“There’s a huge opportunity in digital, in that there is a plethora of information and data that sits out there,” said Dando. “I think the big challenge we’ve all got is how we use it effectively, to take actionable insight from the information that we’ve got, that helps us to refine and make our campaigns even better going forward.”