Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

I haven’t posted anything in awhile because I have been really busy and haven’t felt too inspired to share anything.  However, I was sharing this story with someone the other week and thought it might be something other people would find useful. The actual campaign is also no longer relevant so I feel ok to share it.

A year ago, almost to the week, I was just starting to run this display campaign for Stretch Mark cream.  As I used to do, the first thing I did was put up a Google content campaign related to stretch marks.  Pretty much right off the bat it was doing a few hundred sales a day, so I knew the campaign had a lot of potential.  A few days after the campaign launched I started digging into the stats only to see I was getting a lot of sales from articles talking about the news of Chris Brown beating Rhianna (I am really not kidding).

At first I laughed and thought it was odd, but then I thought there had to be a reason this was happening.  After looking through all the articles related to the incident, most we’re coming from Hip-hop sites that I was not actively targeting.  The majority of the people reading these sites were African Americans.  I had never thought previously about actively targeting black women for this campaign, but it seemed like it could work.

Taking the idea of targeting Black Women specifically because of my referral data, I created a quick content campaign that was full of placements geared toward black women.  I found a lot of sites that I didn’t know about (which is always great) and realized that many of them were a lot larger than I realized.  After the first day or so it stood out that Black Planet could be a huge source for this campaign.  Taking my Google content campaign data, I called Black Planet and signed an IO to target women ~25 and over (I don’t quite remember) and it did very well.

Point of the story is that if you pay attention to your traffic and really look for patterns, you can learn to infer demographic data about your sales patterns without forcing customers to give the data to you.  As you’re scaling campaigns, look for patterns and ways your can use those patterns to scale the campaign even further.