Digital marketing means selling your product or services to your target audience by using digital platforms like websites or social media. Running a business on a digital platform involves how you can pinpoint your target audience. This article will cover 8 audience-targeting strategies from digital marketing experts.
Understanding Your Audience
Understanding your audience involves the analysis of three aspects of customers. These are demographic profiling, psychographic analysis, and behavioral segmentation.
Demographic profiling
Demographic profiling involves collecting surface-level data like age, gender, education level, income ethnicity, and religion to construct a profile of your customers. The usefulness of demographic data is it helps you build different audience profiles. One demographic audience profile could be, for example, age group. The importance of building different demographic profiles is it helps digital marketers understand their audience better, and create more personalized campaign to attract their attention.
Psychographic Analysis
Psychological characteristics imply a bunch of personal traits like lifestyle choices, desires, goals, and values. Analyzing these personal traits will help better understand your target customers attitude. Psychographic analysis is a more powerful tool than demographic profiling to operate a successful marketing campaign.
Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is grouping people based on factors that dictate their purchasing decisions. These factors include customers’ knowledge about the company or product, their buying habits( do they buy regularly or buy only on special occasions like holidays or birthdays), and their experience with your products. Marketing campaigns involving behavioral data let companies reach customers more closely allowing them to manufacture products with a more personal touch.
Importance of Audience Targeting
personalization, and relevance
There is a tectonic change has taken place in the advertising world. Gone are the days when companies relied on TV commercials to reach their customers. But now in today’s digital age, people want companies should understand their personal needs, preferences, and benefits. Tracking your target audience will help you deliver your business message more effectively.
Improved conversion rates
Identifying your target audience will help you deliver them engaging, and relevant content. Because of engaging, and relevant content, users will spend more time on your site, purchase products, and thus increase conversion rates.
Enhanced Brand Loyalty
Targeted customers can also turn into your brand’s loyal customers by providing them with high-quality products or services. When customers are satisfied with your products or services, they become loyal is a fact that has little dispute.
Audience Targeting Strategies
Strategies 1. Demographic Targeting
Marketers are often overwhelmed with the sheer number of traffic to a site. However effective communication needs communicating with the right group of people. Otherwise, your messaging would be lost. The messaging would also need to be crafted so that it contains the information that your target audience is looking for.
Strategy 2: Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting involves tailoring messages or advertisements based on users activities that are valuable to your business, and sending them to your segmented audience to attract their attention. Here segmented audience means a specific group of people who are likely be your potential customers. There are no shortages of customers in digital marketing. However,reaching your specific group of customers with the right message is the main thing for better ROI and conversion rates.
Strategy 3:Social Media Targeting
Social media targeting is a business strategy that involves showing ads or content to a specific group of people who may turn into your real buyers. Demographic, and behavioral data are key to developing targeted social Ad campaigns. The usefulness of this business strategy is a business can target several social media users concurrently while running a marketing campaign.
One example of social media targeting is the use of different age groups by social media marketers to show relevant Ads to them. Displaying different types of shoes based on age groups is an instance of social media targeting.
Strategy 4 : Retargeting and Remarketing
Digital marketers adopt different strategies to increase traffic expecting that it will increase conversion rates. However, the ground reality is only a fraction of visitors convert that is purchase a product. That fraction goes down further when you take into account that only a slim percentage of visitors purchase something during their first visit to a site. The concept of retargeting evolves from this reality.
So what is retargeting? It is a marketing strategy that involves showing online Ads to visitors who once visited your site but did not complete the purchase process. How it is done? Once a visitor enters a site, and clicks on a product , or do other things, the site sends cookies to the visitor site’s browser. The product hosting site then retrieves data from cookie about the visitor, and then with the help of third party like Google display network, or meta display Ads of the product to the visitor when he visits even other sites.
What about the other term remarketing? The term is a bit confusing to many since sometimes retargeting and remarketing is used interchangeably. So, are they same? The answer is no. Because basically remarketing is you already acquire a customer. You want to re-engage with your past customer by sending e-mails or paid ads. In a marketing strategy, you need to adopt both retargeting, and remarketing techniques. There is no either, or option.
Strategy 5: Lookalike Audience
Facebook introduced this audience-targeting strategy in 2013. It helped online advertisers to expand their target audience without spending much time. The concept of this strategy is there is a good probability that your best customers have shared demographic, and personal traits. Facebook offers a segmentation tool to find your lookalike audience. If you select your ‘ seed audience’ or 100 best customers in this tool, FaceBook then utilizes its tracking pixels, and vast data ecosystem, as well as other social media platforms like WhatsApp, and Instagram, to algorithmically generate a much bigger similar-minded audience for you. This audience is referred to as the lookalike audience. Selling your products or services to this audience is more viable than targeting your entire audience.
Strategy 6: Email Segmentation
E-mail segmentation is the division of an E-mail subscribers list into small groups, and then send e-mails to specific group members instead of sending a whole database of e-mails to everyone. It is an efficient technique to reach your relevant audience with your message. Sending e-mails to a bunch of customers who are not supposed to get the mail is worthless. Success in e-mail marketing mainly depends on e-mail segmentation.
Strategy 7: Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting involves crafting content using language, and behavior of a specific geographic location to show advertisements to that area. Geo-targeting also known as location targeting is a valuable strategy for local businesses like restaurants, Doctor’s office, or any brick, and mortar stores. Web Analytics tool like Google Analytics show geographical location of your website visitors. Analyzing geographical data then reveals other data of website visitors like country, region, city, or in more granular level like the IP address. Showing Ads that is not relevant to your business area is a waste of advertising budget.
Strategy 8: Personalized content Recommendation
Content personalization involves gathering various data of your target audience like demographic, contextual, and behavioral data, and then crafting and showing them content of products or services that is relevant to them. Visitors find irrelevant Ads distracting, and making their online purchasing time-consuming. So your customers should not be annoyed with immaterial content.
Each business is different. It means a strategy that is ideal for one business may not be appropriate for the other. When it comes to knowing a perfect match of a strategy, and business, geo-targeting and local business is a sure match. However, other businesses cannot safely adopt a specific strategy. Depending on their business nature, they need to experiment with different strategies before finally adopting one.
