There is a reason why marketing campaigns end up failing and costing businesses a fortune, their inability to conceptualize who their audiences are, their needs how they can reach them. Failing to use data-based tactics to reach their best possible audience for their ads and marketing campaigns means they end up throwing a huge portion of their marketing budget to waste.
To avoid such wastage, many businesses are now turning to data-based marketing strategies to target their customers. Utilizing audience targeting, they are now able to know what content and ads interest their potential clients and adjust their marketing strategies to meet their potential clients’ demands.
What is audience targeting
Audience targeting is the ability to target your marketing campaign to a specific group of people who are more likely to want your product or service. These groups are categorized based on different criteria, including online behavioral characteristics, demographics, age, interests, intent, income and location.
With audience targeting, marketers are able to reach consumers interested in their products or services with relevant messages personalized for their audience. Audience targeting also decreases the odds that the amount spent on ads is wasted or overspent on people that have no chance of buying your products and services.
In recent years, the process of audience targeting has evolved to incorporate not only the basic primary targets, secondary targets and a specific section of a marketing demographic, but also customer journey analytics that helps marketers analyze data of potential clients and how likely they are to be interested in their products. This advancement has allowed marketers to focus on more granular audience segments by fine-tuning the characteristics of their potential clients.
How to build your target audience
Your target audience is made up of individual customers, meaning that the more you know about your customers, the better understanding you will have of how to create your target audiences.
As a marketer, the best place to start is by looking at your customer profiles. This will help you get an idea of what your customers are more interested in.
To acquire customer data, you need to analyze data that you already have. Perhaps you use a data management platform (DPM), customer relationship management (CRM), or customer data platform (CDP) on your business to manage customers. These are the perfect platforms to acquire profiles of your customers.
You may also need more data about your customers, such as their purchasing behaviors and how they interact with the internet. This data, which is not available in DPM, CRM and CDP, can be acquired through analytic solutions offered by third-party platforms such as social media sites and search engines.
To build an effective audience targeting strategy, you should ensure that all your customers have a single ID that can identify them across multiple platforms. This helps you collect your customer data more accurately and prevents you from collecting data from a single customer as different profiles or visitors.
Once you have implemented customer tracking and gathered all your customer profiles, you can now go ahead and activate your audience targeting strategy. These strategies may make use of other platforms such as social media platforms, e.g., Facebook, search engines, e.g., Google ads, that gives business the ability to narrow down their prospective potential clients while advertising with them.
Personalizing your audience targeting strategy
One of the most common challenges that marketers are faced with is focusing on a broad audience. For instance, a marketing strategy that is only targeting a demographic of potential clients who are between the ages of 18-50 may be ineffective. This is because this category is very broad and a majority of people in this demographic may not be your target audience on a granular level.
The result of running such an ad or a marketing strategy is that majority of people who come across your ads or content will not be interested in becoming your clients. To avoid this, you should be more specific about your audience. For instance, rather than targeting only the 18-50 demographic, you can add details such as their gender and their interests to narrow the target audience down to a smaller audience segment of users that are more likely to convert.
Another challenge marketers need to overcome is the urge to run too many ads to their target audience. This is especially true when it comes to customers you already know are interested in your products and services. This makes it easy for you to over-target them with too many ads. The strategy may become frustrating to your customers and end up having negative results to what it was intended to.
To become more effective on your audience target, you should consider using pre-purchase data in your personalization efforts. This data offers insight into what your customers were doing right before they ended up buying your products and services. It also helps the marketers fine-tune their strategy to capture other customers that may be having similar profiles with these customers.
Optimizing return on investment
As a business, you want your marketing efforts to yield revenue for you. You also want to ensure that the amount you are spending on your marketing is not hurting your bottom line.
Therefore, it is important to keep on evaluating your audience targeting strategy regularly to ensure that it is having positive results in your business.
In today’s business world, businesses are not just looking at just growth but also their ability to retain customers and creating a brand around a product.
Marketers should use key performance indicators such as conversion rates, customer lifetime value and net promoter scores to determine how effective their audience targeting is and whether they are reaching the right people. This will also help them determine if they are making a good revenue that covers the marketing costs.
“Audience Targeting can certainly feel overwhelming but know that you’re not alone. Partnering with an experienced website company can help protect you and provide the best experience for your users. Contact us today for a free audience targeting consultation.”
