Jessica Knobbe

“Friend of the Day”, “What 60’s Movie Star Are You” or “Which Candy Bar Totally Represents Your Entire High School Career”- Facebook quizzes are all the rage.  Polls have always been a way to find out about audiences for marketing and Facebook is no different.  The big one going around right now is called “My Friends On Facebook”  The basis is it takes all of your friends’ stats and it breaks out the information into pretty shiny pie charts and percentages- 19 of my friends are Virgos and 69% are Democrats!

Here is the amazing part about this and all quizzes on Facebook- you give it permission.  You say ALLOW and this little unassuming quiz suddenly collects immense amounts of geographic, demographic and psychographic information about you and your virtual social circle.  And who is it that gets this info? Well, my guess is based on the 20 second spot right before you get your results is Mobil 1.  Yes Mobil 1, the worlds leading motor oil, suddenly has information that the US Census is jealous of.

Now most likely reading this you are not surprised by this or at least you shouldn’t be.  I think the most interesting part is what are they doing with this data? Are they creating fan pages to bolster brand loyalty?  Are they finding geographic areas that match their target demographic and bumping up Internet or broadcast spend?  If your company or group is using Facebook polls to target your marketing efforts tell us if it’s working or what challenges you face in this social media space.

So at this point you might be wondering to yourself, “Why marketing on target?”

I started in the marketing field when I was 15. Now, it wasn’t officially called marketing it was called being a server at the local golf course restaurant- but stay with me. At that time little did I know but I was learning the intricacies of figuring out my audience. Through the years I became better and better at the finesse of it and post college landed a coveted job in an established restaurant in downtown Omaha called M’s Pub. (A small aside, I did finish college with a graphic design degree but I was sure at that point I wasn’t ready to sit down in a cube) At M’s the saying was M’s supplies the product and the space, but you need to sell it and make it a great experience for your diners, aka audience. I learned about people. How they behave in their leisure time, how they react, what they expect and how to react to them. I figured out how to continually adjust my marketing message shift to shift, table by table, customer by customer.

After a few years the lure of the regular hours and 401k started to look quite appealing. A friend that I worked with at the time recommended I apply at my current company. Thankfully the manager that interviewed me saw my transferable skills and hired me. Now audience targeting at a granular level is my central focus. Through the years I have been involved with different stages of the service that we provide but the overall message is the same: Find your target audience and eliminate wasteful media spending. So, I am back to (or I guess I never left it) how do they behave, how do they react, what do they expect and how do we react to them on behalf of the client. Concepts ring true, only the tools are different. How do we adjust the message market by market, system by system, household by household?

The top layer of my marketing experience is the degree that I am currently working on in Internet Marketing. I have found a passion with online marketing as I think the audience targeting and analytics potentials are amazing. Tracking is at a level never been seen before in media and so the how and what of the audience is getting sharper by the day. Geographic, demographic and psychographic behaviors crossed with quantitative elements can create a user experience that is practically mind blowing.

So, how do we adjust the message page by page, click by click and minute by minute?

My name is Jessica Knobbe and I am a Chicago based marketing strategist specializing in audience targeting through Internet and traditional media planning, analytics and campaign management.  In this space I want to talk about my own experiences using targeted marketing as well as comment on the ever (and rapidly) changing  landscape where advertising is becoming more precisely focused and marketers are being held ever more accountable. 
I might post on an article that I read, an experience that I had or even about my challenges as I move my efforts from a broadcast background into the vastness that is online.  The concepts are the same, the executions are different but in the end it’s all pretty cool stuff. 

Welcome to Marketing on Target.