Micro-Targeting

Micro-targeting is aiming a small budget at a small, valuable audience: one person, the staff of one company, or the forty people who decide whether you get the contract. The smaller and more valuable the audience, the more a dollar buys. It’s Part 3 of the Dollar a Day master course, which has the full lesson.

Three stories that show it

• An audience of one. For Eric Ludwig’s 50th birthday I ran an ad aimed so tightly that the person who saw it was him, at about 83 cents a day (the story).
• One company’s staff. Bryce Clark spent $4.33 aiming his write-up at the dealership that owed him $973.33, and got paid back in full (the story).
• A handful of executives. Bryan Eisenberg’s mom put a dollar a day behind her story, aimed at Sears executives (the story). The Enterprise complaint follows the same pattern.

What each network lets you aim at

• LinkedIn: company, job title, seniority, industry, or your uploaded list of target accounts. Its minimum daily budget is higher than a dollar, so spread the same logic across a few posts (boosting on LinkedIn).
• YouTube: people who searched your terms, watched your videos, or watch the channels your buyers watch (lateral targeting for B2B, the $6 HVAC owner test).
• Facebook and Instagram: your warm pool of video viewers, page engagers, site visitors and matched customer lists (custom audience architecture). An older walkthrough: microtargeting on Facebook at a crazy cheap price.

Where targeting fits

Targeting comes last. Proven content first, clean tracking second, then aim. Give the algorithm a post that already earned attention and it finds more people like the ones who engaged (signal beats targeting). Targeting options and audience minimums change, so check each network’s current controls before you promise who will see an ad.

Part of: Dollar a Day, the master course · All the stories