Client Success: Building Brand Awareness Among a Niche Regional Audience

Cost-effective advertising depends on precise audience targeting—especially if you’re a small business trying to maximize ROI for a fixed ads budget.

The challenge of achieving these cost-efficiencies can be even greater when your business is targeting a niche, dispersed audience. This is the challenge one regional jet ski and boat retailer faced when investing in advertising: because its audience was so small, and not concentrated geographically in any one area, the company’s awareness-level advertising was struggling to reach its target audience—and suffering a lot of wasted spend as a result.

Recognizing the need for a different approach, the jet ski and boat retailer turned to Cox Media for help.

The Goal

Despite its past struggles to generate ROI from top-of-funnel ad campaigns, the regional retailer still believed that awareness-level campaigns were the best fit for its advertising goals—as long as those ads could reach the company’s target audience.

Cox Media’s advertising experts agreed. Together, the retailer and Cox Media’s team established a goal of delivering top-of-funnel ads to a niche audience of current and prospective jet ski and boat owners who enjoy the outdoors and were interested in either purchasing a new water vessel or upgrading to a more powerful model.

The Solution

After referencing Cox Media’s internal research and learning more about the target audience through conversations with the client, our advertising experts recommended a digital video campaign delivering ads to the target audience via YouTube. The target audience was defined through this campaign based on demographic and other relevant data reflective of consumers with the financial means and interest in purchasing a recreational water vessel.

In addition to this digital video campaign, Cox Media created a second customized audience specific to consumers who were shopping for jet skis and waverunners, enabling two strategic approaches to engage prospective customers of the regional retailer. To increase impression delivery and maximize campaign reach and video viewing frequency, a combination of skippable and non-skippable ad buys were employed, along with YouTube Bumper ads.

To maximize ad relevance to the target audience, location-based targeting was set up to restrict ad delivery to regional ZIP codes where the client was eager to build brand awareness and drive conversions.

The Results

After an initial five-month run, Cox Media’s digital video campaign delivered the following results:

• More than 18,576,000 impressions delivered to the target audience;
• Nearly 13,700 ad clicks;
• A surge in the retailer’s website traffic during the campaign.

Based on the strong initial results of this campaign, Cox Media’s ad team concluded that a customized audience was the most effective tactic for helping the regional jet ski and boat retailer connect with its target audience.

The client agreed with this assessment. Thanks to the strong ROI of this awareness-level campaign, the client decided to continue with this recommendation after the initial five-month campaign was finished.

For many local businesses, building brand awareness is a critical first step in attracting new customers—but traditional ad channels are too costly and inefficient to make these awareness-level campaigns worth the investment.

Digital advertising channels, as well as innovative audience targeting tools, can help identify your target audience within a much larger population so that ads can be delivered only to these high-value prospects. That’s what Cox Media’s experts did for this regional jet ski and boat retailer—and our team can do the same for your business.

No matter who your audience is, the right mix of audience targeting and advertising channels can help you connect with your customer base. Contact us today to get started.