Who are weactually talking to?
Value created for the team
Gave the team clearer options for audience targeting, and a distribution routine so posts went out with a defined audience and timing.
Achievement
Built filtered Meta audiences by restaurant and occasion, and set up the scheduled distribution layer across WhatsApp copy, captions and Metricool.
In Week 2 I worked in Meta Ads Manager, sorting and filtering customer profiles to build targeted audiences. It was the first time I saw that a campaign is not one decision but two — what you say, and who is standing there when you say it.
The task
I filtered customer profiles into audiences that suited different restaurants and different occasions: someone looking for a casual weekday meal is not the same person as someone planning a date night or a celebration. The same content placed in front of the wrong group is not weak creative — it is a well-made advert being shown to someone with no reason to care.
How wide should an audience be?
Budget spreads across people with no interest in the cuisine, the price point or the neighbourhood. Reach looks healthy, relevance falls, and the creative gets blamed for a targeting decision.
The audience may be too small to deliver efficiently, costs climb, the same people see the advert repeatedly, and genuinely interested customers just outside the filter are never reached.
There is no correct width in the abstract — it depends on what the campaign is for. Introducing a new menu to people who have never visited needs a wider net than filling weekday lunch covers for people who live nearby. Deciding the objective first is what makes the audience decision answerable.
Same lesson, different channel
On Day 4 I wrote WhatsApp marketing messages, social captions and hashtags, and scheduled posts in Metricool. WhatsApp is personal, so a message has to be short, relevant and easy to act on or it reads as spam on a channel people use for their friends. Hashtags follow the same rule as audiences: cuisine, location and occasion tags reach people already looking; generic tags reach volume that was never going to book.
Marketing is not about reaching everyone.
It is about reaching the people the objective depends on — and being honest that the definition of that group is a marketing decision, not a settings screen.
Evidence from the internship
The specific moments this case study is built on.
I learnt to sort and filter customer profiles to build more targeted advertising audiences for different restaurants.
I assumed strong creative would carry a campaign and targeting was an administrative step at the end.
Defining the audience changes what the creative should say. A message written for someone discovering a venue is not the message for someone who has already eaten there — so the audience decision has to come before the brief, not after it.
I wrote promotional WhatsApp copy for lunch sets, new menus and reservation reminders.
My first drafts were full — every offer detail included, in case the customer wanted it.
On a personal channel, length reads as pressure. I cut to one clear offer and one next action, and started thinking about timing and relevance as part of the message rather than as scheduling admin.
I scheduled posts across accounts instead of publishing them individually.
Scheduling looked like a convenience tool.
Planning ahead forces content to be seen as a sequence rather than a series of separate posts, which is where consistency and campaign timing actually come from.
The trade-off
What pulled against what
Scale against precision; a single efficient campaign for the group against separate audiences per restaurant and per occasion.
Why the obvious answer was not enough
Reach without relevance spends money on people who were never going to visit, and the failure looks like a creative problem.
Why I chose this approach
Separate audiences per restaurant, filtered by interest, occasion, location and previous engagement, with the objective defined before the creative brief.
Going deeper
Why platform choice is part of the message
The same offer needs different shapes on different channels. WhatsApp is direct and action-focused, Instagram carries polish and atmosphere, TikTok needs a hook and a human reason to keep watching. Treating them as distribution points for one asset wastes the strengths of all three.
The assumption I still want to test
I assumed occasion-based segmentation — casual lunch, date night, celebration — reflects how people actually decide. It is a reasonable model, but it is a model. Real booking data might show the divide is location or price sensitivity instead.
The obvious answer
Make a strong advert and put budget behind it.
What was more complicated
Reach without relevance spends money on people who were never going to visit, and the failure looks like a creative problem.
What I would test nextProposed next test
I would test two audience widths against the same creative and compare cost per result, so audience decisions come from evidence rather than reasoning.
What I contributed
Gave the team clearer options for audience targeting, and a distribution routine so posts went out with a defined audience and timing.
I built filtered customer audiences in Meta Ads Manager for different restaurants and occasions, and produced the distribution layer around campaigns — WhatsApp copy, captions, hashtag sets and scheduled posts in Metricool — so content went out with a defined audience and timing rather than being published ad hoc.
Decision rules I would carry forward
The objective and the audience are written before the creative brief and stay visible during review.
For the next three campaigns, review creative with the audience line at the top of the page and record how often it changes a decision.
Audience width is treated as a test, not a guess: one broad and one narrow version always run together.
Split a small budget across a broad and a narrow audience for the same creative and compare cost per action, not reach.
Success is defined before a campaign runs; views alone never count as a result.
Agree one primary action per campaign — booking, save, enquiry — and track it for a month before judging any format.
Start every campaign with a written objective and audience definition, then choose the channel and let the creative follow from both.