Overview
An audience targeting planner helps a paid social manager turn scattered audience ideas into a launch-ready targeting plan. This playbook installs an audience plan table and targeting assumptions document so segments, exclusions, hypotheses, source evidence, channel fit, owners, and review status live in one durable workspace.
Use it before a campaign launch, monthly paid media review, or budget shift where the team needs to decide who to target, who to exclude, and which assumptions are strong enough to test. The output is not an ad-platform build sheet. It is the planning layer that makes the build sheet less wobbly.
Why you should plan paid audiences before launch
Audience planning gets messy because every channel offers different levers. Meta's guidance on detailed targeting points marketers toward demographics, interests, and behaviors, while LinkedIn's ad targeting page frames targeting around professional attributes. Those choices are useful only when the team has agreed what each audience is meant to prove.
This planner makes the hypotheses explicit. Instead of keeping audience notes in decks, Slack threads, old campaign exports, and someone's private spreadsheet, Juno turns them into reviewable rows with evidence, exclusions, confidence, and next actions.
It also keeps exclusions from becoming a last-minute scramble. Existing customers, poor-fit industries, unsupported regions, employees, current opportunities, sensitive categories, or low-intent groups should be visible before spend starts moving.
Step-by-step
- 1Confirm the brand or product, offer, campaign goal, audience universe, paid channels, planning horizon, and constraints that should shape targeting.
- 2Review the installed targeting assumptions document so the audience thesis, evidence standards, exclusions, channel-fit rules, and out-of-scope work are clear before rows are added.
- 3Populate or update the audience plan with one row per target segment, exclusion, retargeting pool, lookalike idea, interest cluster, role group, account-like slice, community, or holdout.
- 4Ground each row in evidence from the workspace, website, customer research, sales notes, campaign history, public competitor signals, or user-supplied planning context.
- 5Score the plan for launch usefulness by checking inclusion logic, exclusion logic, offer fit, funnel stage, creative angle, landing-page match, tracking signal, priority, confidence, owner, status, and next action.
- 6Refresh the assumptions document and summarize the audiences to test, audiences to exclude, weak evidence, channel-fit concerns, and decisions needed before launch.
- 7Reuse the same workspace for monthly reviews when the team wants audience decisions to improve over time instead of restarting from a blank spreadsheet.
Frequently asked questions
Does this replace an ad account setup workflow?
No. It replaces the audience planning spreadsheet that usually sits before account setup. Native audience creation, uploads, campaign publishing, budget management, and platform edits stay outside this playbook.
What inputs do I need?
Bring the offer, campaign goal, target customer groups, channels in scope, planning horizon, and any exclusions or compliance constraints. Juno can create a first pass from thin context, but it will label assumptions and evidence gaps clearly.
Can it work without ad-platform connectors?
Yes. The minimum workflow uses default Juno research, workspace context, tables, documents, and optional scheduling. Platform connectors can enrich a later performance or setup workflow, but they are not required for this planning replacement.
How often should I run it?
Run it before campaign launches and review it monthly for active paid social programs. Run once by default, and monthly reviews are opt-in.
