Case Study - Cartier

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

How Cartier reached their audience

Like all jewelry brands, Cartier wanted to make an impression for Valentine’s day. To do so, they decided to use social media advertising. This was because they knew the power of the audience targeting options available, but also the product awareness and consumer interest-driving qualities of social marketing among key audience groups. The enhanced awareness and audience engagement of social media users contributes directly to high conversion rates and sales through Facebook, or via other channels working together.

You can see the tactics and targeting Cartier used to reach their perfect audience. Think about it for a second. How do you gather information so granular to understand what your audience knows, likes, and follows, and where they are buying already? Audience research is the key to creating powerful campaigns because it allows your brand to reach the people who will be most interested in you.

To gain these insights, Cartier might have used a set of tools including:

• Social media and competitive research, to know how their competition was positioned and who their audience already follows.
• Google Ads keyword research and social media monitoring, to find related interests and what searches are driving people to action.
• Demographic research based on their internal database of clients for the demographics targeting age and job.

Granular analysis of your audience using digital tools can help define such precise targeting. Facebook’s targeting tools are also very powerful at providing suggestions based on past campaigns and the entire data set of all ads that have run on their platform. Cartier could also have used retargeting to target past customers, or lookalike audiences to target people who have similar traits to their existing customers but aren’t a customer already. This is a great way to expand targeting to potential new customers based on their existing customer profile.

But research doesn’t stop at targeting. It is essential to use what you know about your audience to develop the types of content and messaging you want for your ads. This will help create the most effective and engaging tone for your copy and text, as well as the ideal look and feel for your images, banners, website, and videos. In this stage you have to understand what triggers the audience’s interest and communicate this in your ads, website assets, and content to drive engagement and action.

This is a very simple example of how audience research is used in everyday campaigns to resonate and push well-rounded content. As a result of their efforts, Cartier saw a 2x return on ad spend, became 40% more relevant to men (as they were targeting couples), and 25% more relevant to women.

Can you think about other campaigns that you have seen and thought they were well targeted in terms of location, content, and product? Think about the last ad you saw that really caught your eye and took you to the website, and maybe even the product page. How do you think the marketers have researched and found information about your taste? These are some of the key questions to consider when you look at an advert that resonates with you, and try to understand how you might take a similar approach to advertising your own product or service.