Have you been having trouble increasing sales for your business? It could be a low conversion rate or your ads are running across multiple platforms and just not engaging the right folks. If you are trying different strategies, but not bringing in new customers , the problem may lie with your audience targeting strategies. Who is seeing – or not seeing – your ads, website and other promotional content?
An ad might be very well made, but without an effective strategy for audience targeting, it’s not likely to get the results you’re looking for. Knowing your audience is key, so let’s take a look at the kind of information you’ll need to create a successful ad campaign.
What Is Audience Targeting?
It may seem like the best way to bring in new customers is to gear your marketing efforts towards the most people possible. After all, the more people who hear about your brand, the more new business you might get. But the truth is, overly broad campaigns can be an inefficient use of your marketing budget, especially for a small business.
Audience targeting is the process of identifying the people who are most likely to buy your product or service and crafting a message that will specifically appeal to them. This allows you to spend your advertising dollars where they’re most likely to have an effect. It also allows you to offer your audience personalized content that’s more likely to convert them into customers.
Who is My Audience?
To begin building your target audience, start collecting as much information possible about your customers. Important details include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income level
- Ethnicity
- Purchasing Habits
- Hobbies
Other sources of information you’ll need to consider, include:
- The ads you’ve run so far – who has been responding favorably? This will help you get a sense of who your current marketing efforts are engaging and who has a need for the product or service offering.
- Your current customer base – who are your most loyal customers? Are they new or existing customers? These details can help you create retention and prospect marketing strategies.
- Your competition – who is their customer base? Are they engaging more buyers than you? Why?
Your audience targeting needs to be data-driven to be successful, so learn as much as you can about the audience you want to reach.
Building a Customer Profile
Once you know the demographics of your target audience, you can create a profile of the customers you want to reach. One important tool for this is , a kind of research that gives insight into your audience’s motivations. Psychographics go beyond demographics to give you insights about your customer base, such as:
- Values and priorities
- Fears or concerns
- Interests and hobbies
In the era of online marketing, psychographics is an indispensable tool. Whether you’re running digital ads or building a content marketing campaign, it’s important to think strategically about your audience. What kind of response are you hoping to get from them? What is most likely to get that response? Customer profiles based on extensive research can help you answer these questions.
Making Data-Driven Choices
Now that you’ve gathered information about your audience and constructed profiles of the potential customers you want to reach, how do you effectively use all of this data? Audience targeting can help you refine your marketing strategy by allowing you to:
- Create content that will resonate with your audience by speaking to their personal interests and motivations
- Choose the best platforms for your campaigns based on your audience’s online and offline behavior
- Narrow down the audience that will view your online content, allowing you to spend your advertising budget more efficiently
- Improve your search engine optimization strategy by giving you insights into what your audience is searching for
To get the best results, your plan for audience targeting needs to have some flexibility. It’s important to monitor your campaigns to see what’s working well and what isn’t. With the right data, you can keep trying new strategies and refining your content to improve your results.
How Do I Get Started?
If you need an extra pair of hands to help gather data, create content and develop campaigns that directly speak to your audience. When you work with Mad Hat Maven, you’ll get a team of dedicated strategists, designers and writers ready to take your digital marketing to the next level. Contact us to schedule your free introductory consultation.
