Tighten Your Target: How to Fix Waste in Your 2026 Audience and Geo Strategy

A lot of 2026 plans were built around one idea: protect reach and keep your share of voice.

That sounds good in a deck. In real life, the better question is:

“How much of this reach could ever realistically turn into patients, students, or customers?”

If you are in healthcare, higher ed, financial services, or any high stakes category, you cannot afford to pay for “reach” that has no shot at becoming revenue.

Here is a simple, three-step way to see where you are wasting money and where to move it.

Step 1: See who you are actually reaching

Start by getting a clear picture of where your media dollars are actually going.

You do not need a giant dashboard for this. You need a basic snapshot.

Pull a simple report from your ad platforms. For your main campaigns, break things out by:

• Geography: State, city, and ZIP code where you can get it.
• Audience: At minimum, split into:
  • Prospecting
  • Remarketing
  • CRM or lookalike lists

Now look at only three metrics:

1. Spend: Where is the money going?
2. Conversions: Real actions such as form fills, appointment requests, campus visit sign ups, applications started, account starts.
3. Cost per conversion: Where the platform can calculate it.

That is enough to see patterns.

You are looking for a few big red flags:

• ZIP codes or regions with spend but no conversions
• Audiences that are huge and cheap, but almost no outcomes
• Prospecting segments that eat money while remarketing quietly performs in the background

Mark these as “cut or shrink” candidates. You do not have to act yet. Just see them clearly.

Step 2: Map where your customers actually come from

Now you need the real world side of the story.

This is where most teams skip ahead and get in trouble. They design targeting from inside the platforms instead of starting with reality.

Build a quick real world map. Use whatever data you have, even if it is imperfect.

For healthcare:

• Look at patient counts by ZIP code or county.
• Highlight the areas that consistently drive most visits for your main locations.

For higher ed:

• Look at enrollments or applicants by high school, county, or region.
• Circle your “feeder” schools and areas that actually send students.

For banks and local services:

• Map customer addresses around branches or offices.
• Draw a realistic drive time, not a wishful 50-mile radius.

You are not trying to create a perfect map. You just want a grounded picture of where your customers really live.

Next, sort it into three tiers:

• Tier 1: Core area
  Where most of your current customers come from. This is your home field.
• Tier 2: Growth area
  Places where you have some customers today and a believable reason to grow more.
• Tier 3: Test or aspirational
  Areas with little history, where you are experimenting.

Now compare this map with the media snapshot from Step 1.

Ask a few hard questions:

• Are we spending the most in Tier 1 and Tier 2, where our actual customers are?
• Are we putting meaningful dollars into places that never show up in our customer data?
• Is any part of our plan basically “statewide just because”?

If the answer is yes to that last one, you have found real waste.

Step 3: Move budget from “nice to reach” to “likely to convert”

Now you know two things: where your money is going and where your customers actually come from.

Time to align them.

This does not have to be a painful rebuild. It can be a focused tightening.

Start with the biggest mismatches and make two or three concrete changes in your platforms.

First, tighten geos:

• Shrink or turn off geos that sit in Tier 3 or in ZIP codes with zero conversions.
• Add or increase bids in your Tier 1 ZIPs and core neighborhoods.

Examples of shifts:

• That statewide higher ed campaign becomes a set of campaigns focused on top feeder counties.
• That “regional” hospital campaign shrinks to realistic drive time around the actual facilities, plus a few strategic outlying pockets.

Second, upgrade your audiences.

Move away from purely broad interest buckets and toward your own data.

• Use CRM, portal, or SIS lists to build lookalike or similar audiences.
  • Recent patients for a service line
  • Recent enrollees or applicants
  • New account openers
• Use those lists as your “seed,” not just “all website visitors.”
• Use exclusions where it makes sense:
  • Remove current customers from pure acquisition campaigns
  • Remove people who already completed the action you are paying for

The goal is simple. Spend more to reach people who look like your best customers and less on people who are just “interested in healthcare” or “interested in college.”

Give it a short learning window. You do not need six months.

• Run your tightened setup for 30 to 45 days
• Watch:
  • Cost per appointment, enrollment, or account
  • Which tiers (1, 2, or 3) are actually producing those outcomes

If Tier 1 and Tier 2 results improve and Tier 3 continues to drag, you know where to keep cutting.

A simple checklist for your next marketing review

You can use these questions in your next internal meeting or agency check in:

1. Do we know our top 10 to 20 customer ZIP codes or neighborhoods?
2. Is most of our media spend aligned with those areas?
3. Are our largest audiences built from our own data, or from generic interest or in-market lists?
4. Can we point to at least one change this quarter where we shifted budget from “everywhere” to “where we actually win”?

If you cannot answer those cleanly, your audience and geo strategy is probably leaking.

Why this matters

Tightening your targeting is often the fastest way to free up budget for better creative, better content, and smarter testing. You are not asking for more money. You are moving existing dollars out of dead zones and into places where real decisions get made.

This is the quiet work that separates “busy” marketing from marketing that actually fills beds, seats, and accounts.

At mhp.si, this is the kind of audit we run for hospitals, universities, banks, and complex local services. With a few exports from your current campaigns and a basic customer map, it is usually obvious where the waste is and where you should double down.

You do not need a rebrand to start. You need to stop paying to talk to people who were never going to choose you in the first place.