How utilizing your community can improve your targeted advertising

[In this episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgYakkCr_2Q&list=PLahL-CewOxv8c-lLa2DUjr7lwyBYSpR2O&index=3&pp=iAQB), Miguel talks with ​​Sydney Montgomery, CEO and Founder of [Outline](https://www.myoutline.com/), an interactive web platform that helps students get better grades on essays by making the writing process more interactive. Students have the ability to build an outline for their essays, compare their essay to the rubric, anything that will help students get full points.

When asked about their marketing strategies, Outline markets to students (since they are the end user), but mostly focus on marketing to the teachers, tutors, independent consultants, or institutions who are working one on one with students.

Though they’ve gained their following through organic advertising, we think it’s time for them to start utilizing paid advertising and make use of this community they have built. Which brings us to our rapid return tip!

##### TIP - Building community can be leveraged to create a precise targeting strategy

Marketing strategies that don’t prioritize community marketing are [missing out on brand growth and customer advocacy opportunities](https://www.adroll.com/blog/community-marketing-fuels-growth#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20recent%20report,customer%20lifetime%20value%20(CLV).). Building a community around your brand is a great way to provide value to customers at every stage in the buyer’s journey, thus increasing overall customer lifetime value (CLV).

Because more companies nowadays are turning digital and remote, people are looking for genuine connections with people and brands that share the same interests and values.

The best communities are [organically built over time and can act as a powerful and genuine marketing channel](https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/4-reasons-why-focusing-on-community-is-your-best-marketing/356557). Using community is a great foundation and can be used as a basis of targeting for a very scalable direct acquisition strategy.

##### How Otis can help you advertise to your community

Leveraging data on these groups/audiences is the key to having a precise targeting strategy. What Otis does is utilize the first-party data from linking these communities or social media audiences and followings, that the company has built over time, because they are their top supporters.

We use a lot of the [first-party data](https://meetotis.com/blog/how-businesses-can-party-with-their-first-party-data-to-deliver-relevant-ads-to-their-customers-with-otis-ai) in order to create a [highly targeted strategy to target specific groups](https://meetotis.com/blog/how-to-reach-and-keep-customers-engaged-throughout-the-sales-process-in-order-to-drive-conversions) of people (in this case, students and teachers at the universities).

Advertising to students can be a very targeted approach because they have very specific demographics for the students, and they are able to use that data that they collected from platform signups to help create this precise audience.

On the institution side, it is about convincing these decision makers. Any data on that would be paramount to creating a very precise audience to target those decision makers.

For content creation strategy, we feel continuing their organic advertising approach as well as paid advertising like utilizing influencers or other user-generated content (eg. testimonials from students or teachers that use the platform) can help build authenticity and loyalty to the brand.

As previously mentioned, people nowadays are looking for authentic content, and what better way to hear it from a trusted referral, like a student, who has first hand experience and an emotional connection to the product or service.

Engaging the precise audience with highly targeted, user-generated material that they have an interest in will help boost your conversions since the customer has already shown an interest in your business. This will help keep your brand top-of-mind, thus increasing your brand awareness.