The Internet is a vast space, and the ads you post will surely reach a lot of people in so little time. But having such a broad scope is not always the best thing in digital marketing. To make your marketing efforts count, you need to make sure that the people you reach are going to become actual customers. Audience targeting lets you do just that, and this is how you start with it.
Start with the basics
Start by taking control of your audience targeting strategy. Each campaign should begin with identifying the specific people you aim to reach, which specific content you want to share with this group, and when and where you should share it.
Once you grasp the basics, you can start building custom combinations, and fine-tune the creative aspect for your audience groups, or even exclude certain audiences.
Optimize your CRM audiences
Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) audiences are the group of customers with whom you have already done business. Because they are already familiar with your products and services, they are among your most valuable audiences. However, the effectiveness of this group depends on how well you segment the data on your end.
For instance, the ideal segmenting strategy for a company that sells widgets may include identifying the consumers who purchased last year, last month, last week, or those who purchased an average of once, twice and thrice each year. This allows agile marketers to prioritize audiences based on the likeliness of a repurchase.
Bridge the gap with site visitors
Using a data capture software, you can have the profiles of your visitors and what they do on your site. Create audience groups, including all the site visitors, cart abandoners, and all converters. Once you have the basic audience lists, layer these user groups into your search engine marketing (SEM) programs. With performance data, evaluate the value of each group so you can bid accordingly in search engine ads, like Google AdWords and Bing Ads. Value the audiences that are closer to converting.
Introduce your business to net-new audiences
Net-new audiences are consumers who are not affiliated with your brand, and products or services. The means of reaching these audiences vary depending on the channel you are using.
However, this type of audience are the least likely to convert, since they have neither transacted with your brand nor visited your website. Due to this group’s lower affinity for conversion, you need to measure their performance with distinct KPIs that may differ a lot from other audience types.
Be flexible while being precise
Audiences come in all shapes and sizes with diverse objectives, and expectations that change over time, so a rigid segmentation is not an all-encompassing guarantee. The granularity of the levels of your segmentation depends on the volume of the audience. A granular approach lets you be creative with testing calls to action and content assets, where you can measure what works best for each audience.
With all of these in mind, you can build better consumer profiles that consistently keep up with audience interests, purchase behaviors, and other interactions so you can adjust your approach to match the target audiences. By fine-tuning your targeting strategy across different channels, and along each stage of the buying process, marketers can connect with audiences better. The enhanced connection with your audience will be your edge, and pave the way for the rapid growth and further success of your business.