Targeting the right audience plays a key role in the success of your digital advertising, no matter the industry you’re in. It’s an essential step in any effective marketing activity, and requires you to firstly know your audience as well as understand their needs and how to reach them.
So why is it important to know your audience and how do you define who they are? Let’s dive in.
THE BENEFITS OF KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE
Relevancy – Increase the likelihood of the reader engaging with your ad by delivering a message that resonates. It may be based off previous browsing behaviour or it could be contextually relevant to the content of the web page they’re browsing.
Brand affinity – Presenting a message that is relevant in both the location and moment that someone is looking creates a greater connection with your brand, helping to build customer loyalty.
Less wastage – Serving a relevant message to the people most likely to buy your product focuses your ad spend and delivers a better return on investment.
IDENTIFYING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Your target market are the people who are most likely to buy your product or service. They have specific needs or desires, and you’re offering meets these. Audiences can be grouped by looking at common characteristics and unifying areas of interests. This grouping is called segmentation, and can be done by analysing your target audiences characteristics. There are four main types of segmentation.
Demographic (who they are) – attributes like age, gender, income level, profession and even relationship status.
Psychographic (interests) – browsing behaviour can determine a lot about a person’s interests and lifestyle choices and whether your product or service meet these.
Behavioural (shopping) – online behaviour like search queries and loyalty program participation can identify where someone is in the purchase funnel. Through tracking this behaviour you can identify if they have interacted with your brand or brands like yours, and how ready they are to make a purchase.
Geographic (physical location) – based on factors like city or postcode, this is valuable if your goal is to localise your marketing. It’s also useful if you have specific regions that have high demand for your product, or where there is low competition.
TARGETING YOUR AUDIENCE
The next step is to deliver your audience the right message in the right place. This requires a sophisticated approach called Contextual Intelligence which we use here at Acquire. To get the most effective results an audience targeting strategy that uses a number of techniques to deliver business impact is needed – resulting in better audience targeting, less wastage and a better return on investment. If you’re ready to get specific targeting strategies that deliver results for your business have a chat with the team at Acquire. We’re here to help.