Plan Like a Strategist: Why Your Campaign Shouldn’t Start in the Ads Manager

You wouldn’t buy a birthday gift without knowing who it’s for. So why are so many campaigns still planned without a clear audience in mind?

It sounds obvious, and yet it’s still one of the most common issues we see in briefs: clients choosing channels first, and scrambling to make their message fit later. What that usually results in is creative that feels generic, budgets that don’t stretch, and campaigns that are never given the chance to connect.

The better way to do things is deceptively simple: Start with who you want to reach, then figure out how to reach them.

Build the Audience First, Not the Campaign

Our Head of Media Strategy, Matt Elshaw, recently discussed this approach at our event with Google in June. When you start by defining your audience, you give your campaign purpose from the outset. You can speak directly to what that audience needs to hear, test whether the audience size is viable for the channels you’re considering, and help creative land in the right places with the right tone and intent.

It doesn’t cost a lot of extra effort, but it does pay dividends in the impact your campaigns achieve.

What Audience-First Actually Looks Like

Audience-first thinking means going beyond one-size-fits-all profiles.

That could mean grouping people by tightly defined geography, especially if you want your messaging to feel local. Or by interest and intent, like someone browsing kidswear for the third time this month, or a returning customer who’s only ever purchased full price.

You can also think about audiences in terms of familiarity: cold, warm and hot. Cold audiences have never heard of you and need time and education. Warm audiences know who you are, but haven’t taken the next step. Hot audiences are right on the edge. They’ve added something to their cart, asked for a quote, or visited the same landing page more than once. Each group needs a different message, tone, and level of investment.

When you build campaigns around these kinds of signals, you start writing ads that feel like they were made for the person reading them, well, because they were.

Your Best Audience Is Already in the Room

Most businesses already have the information they need to build high-performing audiences.

A good place to start is with the customers you’d genuinely want more of. Think about the ones who spend regularly, make considered choices, or stick around longer than average. What do they tend to do? What products or services do they gravitate toward? How do they behave before making a decision?

You don’t need a spreadsheet to answer that. Often the best insights come from stepping away from the platforms and having a conversation. Get your team in a room. Ask the people who speak to customers every day. What patterns are they seeing? Who’s standing out, and why?

Once you’ve agreed on what “good” looks like, then you can work out how to identify and track those traits. You might already have the data in your CRM, in Google Analytics, or inside your sales reports. From there, it’s much easier to build audiences that matter and you can then send those signals back into ad platforms so they can do a better job, too.

Start Now, So You’re Not Playing Catch-Up Later

Digital platforms are changing fast. Targeting options are shrinking, third-party data is fading, and interest categories that worked six months ago might not even exist next time you log in. You can’t rely on the platforms to know what matters to your business. But you can teach them.

That’s what audience-first thinking unlocks. When you start with real insights—from your team, your data, and your actual customers—you’re building a smarter targeting system for all of your future campaigns.

Want help defining your most valuable audiences? It’s one of the first things we do with every client. Reach out via the form on our Contact page.