What is audience targeting and how to improve your ads for your specific user targeted advertising campaigns:

Audience targeting for online marketing campaigns is essential for success. The more defined your target audience is, in theory, the more successful your campaign will be and vice versa for campaigns without targeted audiences. Introducing strategic audience targeting will improve your ads and provide the marketing success that you’re your business needs. In this article will layout most of the different audience targeting features online marketing companies us & how they can help your advertising efforts.

How to reach the right audience with digital marketing:

If your marketing division or owner (small businesses) already have data on who their ideal customers are, then you’re already ahead of the game. It’ll be easier to get started marketing products & services to the right target audience because you already have an idea of who is most likely to buy. If that data isn’t available and your business is still looking at how to define your target audience, marketing your company online will provide the real-time data needed to give you that insight. Online advertising platforms collect lots more data about users than just their IP addresses. This topic is too much for one article so we’ll be introducing how data is collected in different articles in the future. This data will give insight into how your users interact with the business segmented by the different audience targeting features available. Below you’ll learn the different ways you can customize your targeted advertising campaigns.

How to define your target audience in digital marketing:

We advise that when marketing your business, know who you want to market to. This will increase the likelihood of success and decrease wasted ad spend. In this article we’ll educate you on 10 different audience targeting features that businesses can use while participating in online marketing. As an online marketing agency, we have the option to use them in any combination from only one to utilizing them all.

Demographic Targeting:

Using demographic audience targeting for online advertising campaigns allows you to broadly select who you display your campaign to. Marketers have the option to exclusively target selected subgroups within the segments below and even show ads to all but adjust bids for each subgroup accordingly for ad optimization strategies.

Age:

Target audiences based on their age. This is often offered in by grouping ages (18-24, 25-29, etc).

Gender:

Target audiences based on known users genders. 

Parental Status:

Target users based on if they are or are not a parent.

Household Income:

Target users by income brackets. Income brackets typically include top 10%, 11-20%, 21-30%, 31-40%, 41-50%, and 50% or lower. Income targeting is typically a pillar in most advertising campaigns because you simply only want to market your services to household who have the ability to purchase the product / service that you’re advertising.

Geo Targeting:

Geo targeting is essential to every advertising campaign. This decides the locations in which users view your ads. For local campaigns this targeting features is typically more defined where as national or international is usually more broad.

Topic Targeting:

This type of targeting is used in display and video ad campaigns. It controls which type of website or youtube channels your ads display on. A great example is hypothetically you sell deep sea fishing expeditions and you want to reach users who may be interested in deep sea fishing. You can select to display your video ads on youtube channels or videos that the topics contain “Outdoor Enthusiasts”. This type of targeting is useful because you don’t need to research age, gender, income, or other broader demographics because you’re targeting based on viewing interests. Essentially you’re reaching your target audience without conducting lengthly market research.

Placement Targeting:

Placement targeting is a very specific user targeting feature that’s available to marketing pro’s. This is mostly used when marketing teams have a vast amount of conversion data and can start selecting specific websites or youtube channels to display their ads to. It’s also used in niche markets. An example would be a start up wristwatch company choosing specific placements based on specific youtube channels of influencers in the community.

Audience Targeting:

This type of segmented group is what separates online marketing from other traditional forms of advertising. This is where you can use machine learning and big data to target potential customers who are in the market for your product or service, will potentially be entering the market soon, interested users who know your business but haven’t yet made a purchase, and previous customers who have bought who you want to retarget to collect more sales.

In-Market Audience:

Targeting audiences based on their desires, wants, and needs is a powerful strategy. By electing to use this strategy, a marketer is essentially using a platforms intimate knowledge of individuals within their geographic area. Advertising platforms like Google are constantly collecting data about individuals and compiling internet usage reports to create digital profiles of every individual connected to the internet. Machine learning has also given rise to allow marketers to reach audiences through these platforms that will be entering the market soon and they may not even be aware of it. Example, a user is conducting searches on zillow.com to find a home they want to buy. Google recognizes that a user is in the market to purchase a home (in-market audience), they will be in the market in the future for a mortgage (in-market audience), and they most likely will need moving help (in-market audience). Only 1 of those in-market targeting groups comes from a specific action the user made but Google can predict buying behavior and trends from Big Data and machine learning technology.

Remarketing Audiences:

When users visit your website you start accumulating audience lists based on web traffic. This allows marketers to run targeted ad campaigns to users who have visited a website or completed certain actions on a website. This is a valuable tool because not every user makes a purchase on the first visit or you can retarget high valued repeat buyers back to the website to make additional purchases.

Similar Audiences:

Again, advertising platforms like Google have detailed consumer profiles of internet users. Similar audience targeting taps into this power by assuming interests and user characteristics based on shared similarities. Example, a website visitor is part of a remarketing audience list. That users interests are Rolex, Golf, and BMW. A marketer can choose to advertise to similar audiences to reach a broader audience that is most likely interested in a topic, service, or product. A good fit for a user in a similar audience would be interests of Golf & BMW. That similar user shares 2 of 3 interests with your website visitor so he most likely is interested in Rolex as well.

Strategies for implementing targeted advertising that will improve online advertising campaigns:

Deciding the right targeting strategy and optimized bidding levels for each segmented group can be a daunting task. Options are unlimited and range from simple to extremely complicated. Discovering the right fit for you may take more wasted money and time than you can afford. Give our team a call and let’s chat about your target audience and ways we can help you reach them better.