Tired of wasting your money on ads that simply won’t convert to leads and sales?
There’s just one solution to this – targeting your audience. Proper audience targeting is critical so that your ads are shown to the right set of people, who actually intend on seeing them, because of their interest, basis their searches on the internet.
While some digital marketers already have a tight grip on the targeting of their ads, some marketers just can’t figure out why they aren’t seeing the results, similar to that of their competition.
Audience Targeting for higher ROI
According to the Digital Marketing Institute, targeting your audience allows you to be more accurate when choosing who sees your ads.
Targeting your audience allows you to reach users across the web based on their behavior online, and the signals their actions send about their likes, their interests, and their purchase patterns.
Often brands think that they’re advertising to the right audience, only to realize later that their ads were wasted. Quite literally, 76% of marketers fail to use behavioral data for an effective audience targeting, of their online and digital ads.
It’s extremely important to get your audience targeting right, as then, you won’t be unnecessarily spending your money and your budget on ads that simply do not yield any result. Here is what you need to keep in mind to nail this.
Demographic Audience Targeting
Demographic audience targeting segregates an audience and points out to the marketers their specific age groups, genders, marital status, income range, occupation, etc.
It basically indicates the basics of a population which helps the marketers segment their ads basis these factors, so that their ads, when they target basis these, are then best suited to a particular audience segment. This type of segmentation is widely used by brands such as Coke, Pepsi, Honda, and other big brands.
Behavioral Audience Targeting
Behavioral audience targeting uses the data that is gathered by observing an audience. Examples of this would be an ad that is shown to visitors who buy Davidoff perfumes. This delves into the target audience’s purchase behavior. This is relevant given that 1.66 billion consumers shop online every year.
Psychographic Audience Targeting
Psychographic audience targeting focuses on the audience’s likes, dislikes, values, interests, activities, etc. Marketers use this kind of data for their digital ads, especially for their ads that are centred around their brand voice.
What to do for effective Audience Targeting?
It is usually presumed that audience targeting is a no brainer, but many digital marketers find it extremely difficult to navigate through it. So here’s what you need to do.
Take note of Business Plan
It’s great that now you’re bracketing your target audience, however to do this you need to think through all the aspects of your product. Who would your product really help? What does your product do? Is your product affordable? Does your product work?
These questions would help you jot down all the points about your product or your service, which you could then tap for your marketing and your ad targeting benefit.
Moreover, you also need to keep in mind that today’s audiences are more informed, and are in control of their buying experience, than what it would have been back in 2010. Hence, it would help if you as a business, streamline your content that you put out for marketing, in the form of edutainment.
The average consumer is exposed to 1700 banner ads every month but only takes a look at half of them. In case you’re new to advertising, don’t worry, you can use this content guide to refine the content that you use for your ads.
And if you already have a business and are now looking to upscale, then it’s best that you tap on the data of your loyal customers, to figure out the right target audience for your offerings.
Targeting needs Research
This is a constant need in the digital marketing space, if you want your advertising to be effective at all times. The best way to do this is through research on the market that is associated with your product or service.
What are the current trends in that market? What demands are picking up in that market? Who is your competitor? How are they targeting their audience?
Adding to this, you could also use insights into audience behavior, as well as demographic and psychographic data to understand your target audience better, and what engages them and converts them to consumers. You could also observe your competition to get some unique insights about your market.
Identify your (Target Audience) TG
After you’ve done all the research, and have drawn all the insights about the market that you’re about to enter and cater, you then need to identify your audience. Here’s a helpful checklist that you must follow.
- What’s happening in the market? What are the strategies that are being used by the competition? Identify them.
- Do you have a current set of customers that are segmented into groups? What are these groups?
- What more is your competitor doing?
- How does your product or service help your consumers and what more you could do that would help them further?
- How is the larger market looking with respect to your product or service?
- What are the insights that you have gathered from the results, i.e. after the implementation of your business strategy?
- Now, segment your target audience basis this data…
It’s better to go through this process than to just head blindly for the jackpot, because it is important for a business to know the market that it intends to own, with it’s products or services in the near future.
Moreover, advertising to a particular market after identifying the right TG, would put your money to good use rather than a constant experimentation process.
Narrow your TG
This is when you would start grouping your target audience together based on their demographic, behavior, and psychographic data, as explained earlier. Narrowing down your TG would help you know your TG like the back of your hand.
Conclusion on effective Audience Targeting
These are the factors that would help you get better at audience targeting. As a marketer, identify, and segment your audience, and then target them through your ads in an organized and effective manner.
Would all these groups and TG perform, as expected? Well, that’s not a guarantee. While some may perform exceptionally well, some may not yield the expected results. It is here then that your TG would need some tweaking.
However, before you dive in to tweak your TG, do check if the ad targeting on the ad server is set up properly as per the parameters prescribed.
You could also compare the audience groups and the TGs with each other to identify which one’s are ideal for a particular product or service. Since you have already done ample research to identify your TGs, and still continue your research, you won’t have a problem doing this.
Remember to work on the details so that your ad targeting is on point. What is your approach to audience targeting, and what kind of ad targeting has worked best for you so far?
