The digital landscape of the 21st century is expansive, and as a business owner venturing into digital marketing, you may view the internet as a world of potential new customers. It’s tempting to want to place your products or services in front of every pair of eyes you can, but in reality, less is more. Audience Targeting is the process of taking your full range of potential customers and segmenting it into groups based on a number of different criteria. There are a few different ways to segment your audience, the most common being, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral.
Demographic targeting focuses on the individual and includes criteria such as age, gender, location, income, parental status, life events, education, and work. These factors are important to recognize because they make up the basic outline of who may be interested in your products.
Psychographic targeting is more opinion-based and includes identifying audiences with similar daily habits, food preferences, style choices, and other interests determined by attitudes and beliefs.
Behavioral targeting is segmenting your audience based on their previous online behaviors. This segment will include those who’ve visited your page or similar pages in the past, or even purchased products similar to yours.
You may be wondering what is the point of audience targeting if everyone can benefit from your product or service. Focusing your efforts is crucial to a successful marketing strategy for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it ensures that your advertisements are being shown specifically to those who are interested and are more likely to take the next steps toward purchasing. This specificity saves you money spent on advertising, and increases the likelihood of conversions, therefore increasing your ROI. Audience targeting also allows for more customized messaging. Knowing your intended consumer base allows you to tailor your marketing to fit that audience’s pain points. A lesser-known benefit is the ability to build a better relationship with your consumers, one in which you understand their needs and can create a level of trust that your product will meet those needs. This understanding and humanization of your brand are what help create loyal customers, which helps build lifetime customer value.
Audience targeting, however, is not a one-time endeavor. The key to proper targeting is redefining your audiences over time. People change, attitudes change, and updating your audience from campaign to campaign goes a long way in reaching the right consumers. This is incredibly common for destination marketing and tourism brands, an industry in which our team is well-versed. For our clients, we take great care to ensure that each campaign is directed toward a unique and relevant audience. This could include targeting families with young kids, avid hikers, history buffs, couples looking for a romantic getaway, baseball lovers, and more. Each campaign we run is focused on reaching those niche audiences who have been identified as the most likely to be interested in what’s being offered, and speaking to what would resonate with them.
If you already know your consumer base, audience targeting is a relatively simple next step. If you’re just starting out in digital marketing, you may need to dive into the data to understand who is most likely to purchase your products or services and create audiences based on that information. Or perhaps you are looking to reach a new audience and don’t know where to focus your marketing efforts. Wherever you are in your online marketing journey, our Digital Marketing team is here to help. Schedule an appointment to learn more about how we can ensure that you’re making the most of your budget and are connecting with the online consumers that are right for your business.
