During the Flow workshop at MMA Connect CMO Summit, a delegate asked us a question most marketers will recognise.
If you are running one campaign across several products from the same brand house when the budget doesn’t stretch to separate campaigns, how do you choose the first-party data audience?
This is a practical guide to tackling that targeting challenge.
Below is why per-product audiences break multi-product campaigns, and a five-step process for choosing a single audience that holds them all together.
What is a multi-product audience?
A multi-product audience is a single campaign audience defined by the type of shopper or persona that a group of products share, rather than by the products themselves.
What does this look like practically?
Instead of building one segment per product and dividing the budget between them, you identify the shopper whose basket the products naturally sit in, and put the full budget behind reaching that person.
The distinction matters because a per-product audience is defined by what somebody bought, and a multi-product audience is defined by who they are. Only the second can carry more than one product without the creative falling apart.
Why splitting the budget by product breaks the campaign
Most multi-product campaigns are lost before anyone writes a line of creative. Three products, three audiences, a third of the budget behind each. None of the three gets enough weight to make the impact they need to.
The usual approach is to use a single audience for the campaign and put the whole budget behind it. The reach looks good but the results often fall short because the audience is defined by product overlap, not by a person. It has several unrelated motivations in one segment, and one piece of creative now has to speak to all of them. Which means relevance is quickly lost.
One product, two campaigns
Take an FMCG house with a dozen packaged food and beverage products and one campaign budget. The instinct is to ask which products to put in the campaign. The better question is which shopper the campaign is for, because that decides the product line-up for you.
Say you pick the everyday essentials shopper. Somebody doing a functional stock-up for a household, buying on routine and price. Now the products choose themselves: coffee, rusks, sugar. They belong together because they belong to that person’s shop. The campaign is about value and replenishment, and every product in it supports that message.
Now pick a different shopper. A mom putting lunch-box sized treats in the trolley alongside her essentials. The line-up changes: coffee and chocolate. Same house, different products, and the campaign is about the small reward rather than the price.
Notice that coffee is in both.
One product can anchor two completely different campaigns, because what it means depends on what surrounds it. Coffee next to sugar and rusks is a household staple. Coffee next to chocolate is part of a small daily pleasure. The product did not change. The shopper did.
KEY INSIGHT 💡
Choose the shopper first and the product line-up follows.
Choose the products first and you end up with an audience nobody can write creative for.
Why your own customer data will not get you there
This is the uncomfortable part for brands sitting on a healthy CRM.
Your data records what somebody bought from you. It says very little about who they are, and almost nothing about the rest of their week. It is a record of one relationship, and you are trying to describe a whole person from it.
That gap matters most when you are reaching people who have not bought from you yet, which is most campaigns worth running. The last transaction is a reasonable predictor of the next one in your own category. It is a poor guide to anything else.
How to choose one audience for a multi-product campaign: five steps
Understand the shopper before you look at the products
Write down who you are selling to, in plain language, in a single sentence. “Someone doing a functional monthly stock-up for a household of four.” If you cannot write that sentence, you do not have an audience. You have a product list.
Find the products that make up this moment
Go back to your range with that sentence in hand and ask one question of every product: would this person have it in their trolley on that trip? Not would you like them to. Would they.
What is left should pass three tests:
- It fits the same shopping moment, so it is bought on the same trip for the same reason.
- It carries the same message, so one piece of creative can sell all of it.
- At least one product in the set is something the shopper buys almost without thinking, which becomes your anchor.
Test whether the products still belong together
Coffee and chocolate work. Coffee and dishwasher tablets do not, whatever the budget says. If the products do not share a shopper, they should not share a campaign, and no audience strategy will rescue that. Split the campaign instead.
Build the segment from verified purchase behaviour, not stated interest
Interest targeting works from what somebody has told a platform about themselves. A segment built on stronger signals like completed transactions is verifiable, recent and specific to a category, and it is the only way to see adjacency, because adjacency is something people do rather than something they declare.
Brief the creative off the shopper, not the segment
“Wine buyers” is a targeting instruction. “Somebody buying for a table of six on Sunday” is a brief. The audience decision is the first line of the creative brief, not a media task that happens after sign-off, because the audience determines what the work has to say.
Choose better audiences
Use Flow’s Audience Marketplace to browse verified first-party audiences from across South African retail, dining, travel, sport and entertainment, and rent the ones that match the shopper you have pinpointed.
Now you’re building your campaign with:
- A clear understanding of the shopping moment and intent
- A product collection that feels relevant and appealing to the target audience
- An audience built on strong, verified and relevant signals instead of broad interests
- Creative that aligns to the shopping moment and intent
What is a multi-product campaign audience?
A single campaign audience defined by the shopper a group of products share, rather than by the products themselves. Rather than building a segment per product and splitting the budget, you identify who buys across the set and put the full budget behind reaching that person.
How many products can one campaign carry?
As many as genuinely share a shopper. The constraint is coherence, not budget. If you can describe the person in one sentence and every product makes sense to them, the campaign holds. If you are stretching the sentence to fit the product list, split it.
Should I stop targeting my own category buyers?
No. Existing category buyers are the right audience for repurchase, seasonal and competitive switching campaigns, where the job is to be present at the moment of decision. This method applies to multi-product and growth objectives, where targeting only the obvious audience means paying to reach people who were going to buy anyway.
How is this different from interest targeting?
Interest targeting uses what somebody has told a platform about themselves, or what a platform inferred from their profile, and nothing ever removes them from that audience. Purchase data records a completed transaction, so it is verifiable, recent and category-specific. Adjacency of this kind is invisible to interest targeting, because nobody declares an interest in rusks.
How do I find the adjacent product without basket data?
You need a data set that sees more of the shop than yours does. That is what commerce media partnerships are for. Flow works with retailers, marketplaces and consumer platforms across categories, which is what makes cross-basket patterns visible.
Does a smaller audience mean less reach?
Often the opposite. Platforms price relevance, so serving impressions to an audience that does not respond becomes more expensive than serving them to one that does.
