How to use Audience Spectrum to Target Paid Online Advertising

Familiarise yourself with Audience Spectrum

• If you are starting from scratch, make sure you spend time with your teams to read up on Audience Spectrum. The first basic step is to understand how the model functions as a segmentation tool that classifies the UK population into ten distinct groups (plus 10 subsegments, more on this later) based on attitudes, behaviours, demographics and most importantly their propensity to engage in culture.
• Take the time to understand Audience Agency's Audience Spectrum segmentation framework. Familiarise yourself and the team with the different segments and their corresponding characteristics. Try running a persona workshop to embed this understanding and humanise the data for you and the teams. This helps with buy in the longer term and recognising segment attributes.

Scoping your ad campaign

Following Step 1, you should have an overview of which Audience Spectrum segments align with your current and target audiences as well as their attitudes, behaviours and demographics – including the kind of online channels and content they prefer.

There are two ways to begin scoping your ad campaign:

• Audience first. You may wish to reach or deepen engagement with an existing audience, meaning your campaign is centred around their needs, gain/pain points and online behaviour. The ultimate conversion or action you wish the audience to take is designed around the audience.
• Conversion first. You may wish to achieve a particular conversion, such as ticket sales, membership sales, shop sales, consumption of content, newsletter sign-ups, donations or whatever is useful for your organisation. In this case, you should be using Audience Spectrum to understand which segments would find what you are marketing most appealing.

Alongside deciding whether your campaign is audience- or conversion-first, you need to scope the timing of your campaign:

• Always On. This is for promotion of an offer which is not time-bound. You could be raising awareness of your organisation or whole programme, encouraging email sign-ups or promoting your shop. These ads could be set to run indefinitely.
• Campaign. This is tied to a wider time-bound campaign which could be a specific event, exhibition/production. The ads are set to run for a specific amount of time or until a set budget is exhausted.

Setting goals and audiences

Deciding on the goal of your ads is crucial in measuring their success. Almost every type of ad requires the user to click through to your website, meaning the content of your ad must successfully attract attention and convince the user to travel further down the marketing funnel to result in a conversion.

The most common goals are:

• Clickthrough: You want the user to click on the ad and end up on your website.
• Lead conversion: A user trades their data (such as signing up for email updates) in exchange for an offer or perk.
• Registration conversion: A user signs up for an event.

Defining the audience for your ad depends both on your goal and the behaviour of your chosen audience. You can use Audience Spectrum segmentation to understand which goals best fit your audience and their needs.

If you are developing an existing or new audience then it is a case of determining what content would interest them. You may be aiming at the top of the funnel, only hoping to drive awareness or consumption of a particular type of content. You can use Audience Spectrum to discover which of your target segments are most receptive to your organisation’s artform, the channels they use and the type of content they prefer.

If you are starting with a conversion goal – such as selling tickets for a production or event – then you need to determine which audiences might be most interested in the ad’s content and what you have to offer. You can use our Audience Spectrum Motivation Guides to discover which segments are most interested in your artform, which are most likely to pay and how to reach them.

Choosing a platform

There are a variety of different online advertising platforms. Some have more of an emphasis on using user data – such as location, language, search history – while others are more focused on context, such as serving ads when users search for particular words. The most popular platforms are:

• Meta (Facebook and Instagram Ads). Allow a variety of ads which feature on Facebook pages, within Feeds/Stories/Reels, Search Results, Messages and external sites/apps.
• Twitter/X Ads. Allow ads across Twitter/X’s site and app, including in suggested Followers, Promoted ads and boosted posts.
• Google/YouTube Ads. Allows ads to appear in Google search results, display ads on Google products, in Shopping results, within Youtube videos and on Google Play for apps.
• LinkedIn Ads. Allows sponsored content, sponsored messaging, Dynamic ads within feeds and simple text ads.

Choosing which platform to use will depend on the goal you are aiming to achieve, the audience you are targeting and your budget. Audience Spectrum gives you invaluable insights into the demographics, motivations and interests of your audiences which will help you design a targeted ad campaign. For instance – does your segment tend to search Google for things to do, or do they tend to be influenced by Instagram posts?

Set your Ad tactics

Once you know which Audience Spectrum segments you are targeting, what your goals are and which channels you are using it is time to design the copy, media and format of your ads.

Consider these prompts:

Content and copy: In most ads you only have a sentence to hook your audience in, and depending on what you are advertising a single image, a carousel of images or a video may be more appropriate.

• What kind of messages resonate with your audience? Are they looking for things to do with friends and family? Are they looking for gifts or to treat themselves? Are they more interested in particular types of shows over others?
• What are the gain and pain points of your audience? Are they looking for offers to save money, or are they more focused on the experience? This will dictate the emphasis you place on whatever you are advertising and what to focus on.

Targeting: All ads require parameters for targeting, whether that is the geography or demographic of your audience, the topics they are searching for or the type of things they are interested in.

• What are the interests of your audience? New audiences may be interested in the topic of what you are advertising, or you may be reaching for audiences with a pre-existing interest in theatre, museums and the arts. Use your Audience Spectrum segments and personas to determine your audiences’ wider interests and needs.
• What is your audience demographic? You can target ads geographically depending on whether you want to reach a local, regional, national or international audience. You may also want to target particular age ranges and genders.

Delve deeper: Get to know the Audience Spectrum subsegments.

Once up and running with your ad campaigns, you might wish to consider delving deeper into the segments by exploring the subsegments, which allows for greater differentiation of groups, and is particularly useful in places where there are large dominant segments (e.g., Metroculturals, Kaleidoscope Creativity and Experience Seekers in London).

Review the impact so far and consider whether further segmentation might allow for hyper-personalised e-communications that talk more directly to that group. 

Extra tools

Successful ads campaigns require delving into the data to understand whether you achieved your goals, how effectively your ads performed and generating insights into how you can improve.

While all ad platforms provide analytics to inform you of performance, you can also take advantage of these features:

• Google Search Console. This tool helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google search rankings. It can help you hone the Search Engine Optimisation of your pages, understand what users are searching for when they find your website and ensure that Google is indexing your website properly.
• Google Analytics 4. By delving into this tool’s more advanced features you can better understand the journeys users take on your website, understand how people who click on your ads behave while on your website and explore where their pain points may be.

Retargeting

Retargeting is the practice of reminding website visitors of your products and services after they leave. This can be as simple as emailing them if they have signed up to your newsletter while buying a product, or you can take advantage of Pixels, which use cookies to log that a user has visited your website and which you can then use to target them with ads elsewhere on the internet. It is essential to ensure users opt-in to Pixels, and be aware that changes in legislation means Pixels may soon be a thing of the past.

Step 9: Review, Iterate and Refine – keep going!

Most success in these ad campaigns comes from continuous refinement based on the insights gained from performance analysis. Adjust your segmentation criteria, content strategies, and campaign tactics as necessary and just keep experimenting.

• A/B testing is simply serving two different versions of an ad to the same audience type to help you understand which approach works best. Most ad platforms give you options for A/B testing of your ads based on changes in copy, format, media and forms of targeting.
• It important you and the team stay updated with Audience Agency's Audience Spectrum updates or changes and align your segmentation accordingly. Book introductory sessions for new team members or refresher sessions with your team to keep this at the forefront of your segmentation approach.

You can also see a shorter version of a guide to paid search advertising on our website.