Audience targeting helps you to create effective campaigns with hyper-targeting solutions.
Isn’t that something pleasing to your ears, that your customer is looking for something out of the blue, you are reaching them out with the right offer.
Audience targeting is a win-win situation for both the customer and brands.
Before you through this entire guide, why not pause a bit and save this ebook on audience targeting and have a glance later!!
Top brands using audience targeting data in a variety of ways to leverage the maximum out of it. For example- they are making a separate social media page for every targeted segment of audience and acting on it.
Suppose you’re looking to target your audience better and stop wasting money on ads that couldn’t give your intended result. You’re at the right place.
Yeah, it’s possible with audience targeting.
Want to know how? Stay tuned with this article. Here we are covering 360 perspectives of the audience targeting data to clear all your doubts.
What is Audience Targeting?
Audience targeting is the first step that marketers take to create ads or content that are very specific to a particular segment of audiences who are more likely to purchase that product or services.
To explain, audience targeting is the way marketers use to formulate campaigns that are directly connected with their consumer lifestyles.
It ensures you’re using your marketing resources in the right way for the right people at the right time.
Moreover, it helps you to skip audiences that are irrelevant for your campaign and would not generate any ROI. And move potential customers down the proverbial funnel.
To facilitate you, let’s understand first the different types of audience targeting you can perform.
Types of Target Audience
There are two major types of audience targeting.
Inventory – It serves ads on websites that provide a specific type of content or frequently visited by individuals within a specific demographic.
User – It serves ads to individuals who have demonstrated a particular interest or behaviour.
Let’s Know, What are the Various Types of Audience Segmentation Strategies
Affinity Audiences: Target audience based on the type of lifestyle they follow, their passion, interests, and habits.
Custom Intent Audiences: Based on your campaign’s goal, target users what they’re interested in, passionate about, and their previous purchase history.
Detailed Target Audience Demographics: Target audience based on their long-run life details.
Life Events: Target audiences when they are in the middle of crucial life milestones.
In Market Audiences: Target customer based on their purchase history.
Remarketing: Target customers who already know about you, but are not active currently to make them active again.
Customer Match: Target audience based on their CRM data.
Similar Audiences: New users who hold similar interest to your existing customers.
Product-Related: Target audiences based on usage of products they are interested in.
Data Type: Target customers based on first, second or third party data. It’s trending among advertisers to target and segment audiences for optimizing ROI spend through precise targeting.
Let’s Jump to How Audience Targeting Works?
Audience targeting tools will help the brands to structure, unstructured data, analyze, segment and make active for various marketing and advertising purposes.
Firstly, you need to create your buyer persona to start with audience targeting. A buyer persona is always different for different brands based on the type of audience they are targeting for selling their product or services.
It’s important to note that buyer personas and your campaign target audience will not be the same every time.
It’s always recommended to merge two or more specifications for a broader reach of your audience. Otherwise, you may encounter a case where your campaign left with a single person in the targeting list.
It’s the next step after you gathered the data from your customers.
Once data collected, segmentation and activation of the audience is done.
It could be-
Delivering a relevant ad to them
Running A/B tests to deliver them a personalized homepage or landing page when they are active on your site
Or sending an available offer email, based on their interests or preferences or any other factors that can trigger them.
You might have got the question: what are the ways you can track the activity of your audiences?.
Let’s Put Light on User Activity Tracking.
Cookies
It’s a text file sent from your website and saved in your website visitors browser while they are browsing that site.
Web Beacons
It’s also referred to as” tracking pixel”. It’s a transparent graphic image generally of 1×1 pixel that is placed on a site or in an email and used in conjunction with cookies to collect or transfer details via a graphic image request.
Persistent IDs
Persistent IDs refers to “people-based marketing” rather than device-based. It uses mobile or site login Ids of users such as Facebook to stay with the user across browsing and devices.
How Do you Build a Target Audience?
As you may be aware that coming up with a target audience needs research and analysis. It starts from building your buyer persona separately for various products or services your business offers.
And further involves deciding with who you want to reach and how you can get the information that makes them stand out from competitors.
Here we are facilitating you with some areas to build your audience targeting.
Examine your analytics to get detailed insights into your target audience.
Engage with audiences by organizing events on your website or apps.
Create a segment of the audience who are interested in a particular type of content to grab traffic on your blog.
Generate informative content on social media and examine social media analytics.
Use top audience insights tools.
Engage with social media audiences.
Conduct A/B test to select the most effective target audience.
Add chatbots to your marketing plan.
Start tracking every action of your website visitors.
Keep an eye on advanced strategies.
Run one creative ad, but personalize it for various audiences.
Give priority to SEO.
Let’s know more in detail
It’s unpredictable for the advertisers or marketers to understand which channel or platform to focus on for targeting their audience. Because the audience data is spread across various platforms and channels.
To provide steady experience to the audience, brands must need to consolidate the entire details and activities of the customers across one spot. That’s getting a single view of the customer with a unique ID to the individual. For this, you can use device ids, IP addresses, cookie ID, advertising IDs like the IDFA or Android ID.
Otherwise, you may reach out to the same customers via different channels with the same message that is somewhat disturbing to your audience. Once you have a unified form of data of your audience, you can activate that across various marketing channels easily.
Most probably marketers make use of DMP, CRM or CDP platform to perform all these functions. But this is not enough to compete with your competitors and satisfy the dynamic demands of your customer.
You need granular-level precision details of your customer that too on a real-time basis. Because the data which you collect gets obsolete in a period.
The more advanced way to perform all these functions in a single platform is using a customer intelligence platform. It could be the most probable solution for your customer target needs.
Customer intelligence platforms can collect, analyze, enrich, segment, and activate across various marketing channels.
To suggest you,
Audienceplay is one of such platforms that can perform all these functions in just some simple steps.
It’s a free DIY platform that doesn’t need any technical skills to start with. Besides, it has instructions that are very easy to understand at every step you follow.
Here, you can enrich your data from other top brands data.
Moreover, along with this, it has some additional features such as monetizing your data apart from campaigns targeting.
Let’s Discuss What are Some of the Challenges Companies Face While Audience Targeting?
Generally, marketers go with the broader audience, for example-Suppose you’re running a campaign to sell a beauty product and considering only the age range of 20-45. It can help you in gaining a broad reach, but it will not give you your intended result. To make it effective, you can consider the age range 20-45, who are female and have an interest in beauty products.
Serving multiple ads to your target audience is another challenge. Like from your first campaign examination, you might have got the idea who are interested in your products or services. For other levels of campaigns, you can consider only the individual who has shown interest in your product or services and discard the other. It will save both your efforts and cost, and it’s easy to target them with ads.
Also focussing on the right frequency of ads is also very important for increasing the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.
Focus on brands with personalized content and ads at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Also, most of the brands lack in selecting the right data management and activation tools. If you have the right tool with advanced features can help you in tackling all your challenges with ease.
To Conclude
Nowadays, companies are emphasizing not only on growth but also, retaining customers and enhancing customer experience. It’s the only magical mantra for top brands to increase their customer base year-on-year.
It can empower the brands with the confidence to reach the audience with the right offers at the right time.
It’s the first step towards reaching your marketing end goals.
Firstly, remember to create your buyer persona, on which your content, ad creatives and other factors depend on to run effective marketing campaigns.
Going with the right platform like Audienceplay can only help you in tackling your audience targeting issues.
What are you waiting for? Try Audienceplay now. It’s free!