How to manage and customize audience targeting in marketing plays and sequences

Marketing plays combine audiences and sequences to create end-to-end campaigns. Audiences define your targeting criteria for finding prospects, while sequences contain the actual outreach messaging and timing. This guide covers how to effectively manage audience targeting and sequence customization.

Geographic Filtering and Location-Based Targeting

You can apply location exclusions at both the playbook and audience levels. For geographic targeting, use positive filtering in your audience criteria rather than creating exclusions.

Best practice: Set "Country is equal to United States" directly in the audience filter. This prevents non-qualifying contacts from being added to the audience and enrolled in sequences.

For additional geographic precision, you can use phone number patterns as geographic indicators by adding an OR condition like "Mobile Phone starts with +1" to catch contacts whose country field isn't populated but have US phone numbers.

When using OR groups for multiple geographic conditions, set the group logic to OR so both conditions are treated as alternatives.

Advanced Audience Targeting Strategies

Create multiple audiences for different targeting approaches by layering various filters:

• CRM filters combined with company size and industry filters

• Website activity data for enhanced customization

• Mix of always-on playbooks and targeted one-time campaigns

Example setup: Create a website visitors playbook alongside targeted plays for specific personas or industries.

Lookalike Play Configuration

Use the 'Find lookalike companies' trigger powered by Ocean.io to identify similar companies. For multi-persona prospecting, you have two main approaches:

Option 1: Create separate prospecting actions for each persona with specific prospect limits to ensure balanced distribution.

Troubleshooting Contact Discovery in Lookalike Plays

When companies qualify through the lookalike trigger but no contacts are found in the Prospect step, this typically indicates one of three issues:

Common causes:

• Persona title matching gaps - Prospecting uses title-string matching. If your personas don't include common variants and abbreviations (e.g., "CTO" and "Chief Technology Officer" as separate entries), contacts with those titles won't be found. This is the most common cause of "no people found" results.

• Include Existing People setting disabled - When this setting is off, contacts already in Unify or your CRM are skipped, which can result in zero contacts found even when relevant people exist in your system.

• Prospecting provider coverage gaps - For newer, smaller, or niche companies, external prospecting providers may not have contact data available.

• Exhausted prospecting credits - If your prospecting credit balance is depleted, external prospecting is skipped entirely. Check your credit balance in Settings.

To improve contact discovery rates:

• Broaden your personas with comprehensive title variants and abbreviations (aim for 50-60+ variants per persona, including common seniority and functional variations like VP/Head/Director + function).

• Enable "Include Existing People" (or "Use existing people in Unify/CRM") in the Prospect node settings so existing matched contacts are eligible.

• Review the Prospect action log in the Play execution logs to see the specific "None found" reason for individual companies.

• Consider switching to Waterfall Prospecting mode to use external providers for fresher coverage.

If you need to re-run companies that previously had no contacts found, you can either duplicate the existing Play and point it to the same audience, or create a new "cleanup" Play with an audience filtered to only companies that had zero prospects in the original run.

Multi-Persona Sequence Enrollment

To set up persona-based sequence routing:

1. Ensure your email sequences are published before selecting them in a Play

2. In the Sequence step, click 'Add prospect personas' to pull in personas from the Prospect step

3. For each persona route, configure both the mailbox to send from and the specific sequence

4. Set 'Max enrollments per Company' to limit how many people per account get enrolled

5. Ensure every persona has a corresponding routing rule to avoid errors

Important: Publishing sequences alone does not trigger email sending. Emails only send when both the Play is enabled AND people flow into the Sequence step.

Sequence Management and Conflict Resolution

The platform automatically prevents prospects from being in multiple sequences simultaneously. You can set priority levels in playbooks to control enrollment when prospects overlap across audiences.

For manual control, use the manual enrollment option available on individual contact profile pages.

Re-enrollment and Contact Frequency Management

By default, the system prevents automatic re-sequencing of contacts to avoid over-messaging. If you need to modify re-enrollment policies for specific campaigns, contact support for backend configuration options.

Manual re-enrollment is possible on a case-by-case basis through individual contact profiles.

Testing and Monitoring

Before launching your campaigns:

• Test your configuration thoroughly

• Monitor performance to identify any issues

• Verify that all persona routing rules are properly configured

• Check that sequences and mailboxes are correctly assigned to each persona

This systematic approach to audience targeting and sequence management will help you create more effective, personalized marketing campaigns while avoiding common pitfalls like sequence conflicts or unbalanced prospect distribution.