Nowadays, having an effective digital marketing strategy could be one of the key factors for turning a fledgling business operation into a successful one with a strong brand, loyal customer base, and steadily growing profits. Having an optimized and well-supported website is a crucial prerequisite. However, not many businesses can readily set aside the necessary funds or time to establish dedicated web support and audience targeting marketing teams, especially when you take into consideration the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with rising inflation.
Instead of wondering how to acquire the necessary resources, likely by taking on more debt, a more prudent decision would be to look into a specialized service such as the WordPress retainers agency DevriX and pick a monthly plan that suits your needs and budget.
Doing so will allow you to delegate the technical needs of your business for back-end and front-end development, leaving more time to focus on other crucial areas that facilitate business growth. Whether you will be building your digital marketing strategy on your own or enlisting the help of experts, you should try to incorporate audience targeting techniques to achieve better and more focused results.
What is Audience Targeting?
Launching a widespread marketing campaign that will reach a large portion of the audience could boost brand awareness, but the ROI (return on investment) may not be that impressive. Better use of the available marketing resources could be to adopt a narrower and more focused approach with audience targeting.
This method consists of separating the larger consumer base into different segments based on psychographic or demographic data. Some useful parameters to consider are consumer age, geolocation, average income, gender, as well as the consumers’ values or motivations as part of their personal lifestyles. Using this data as a basis, you can begin thinking about the most relevant consumer group whose interests or other factors best align with the product or services that you wish to promote.
1. Data Management is Crucial
To reach your audience targeting goals and even surpass them, you need to have plenty of factual and concrete data. Setting up the different audience segments is essential, and to do that successfully, you need to have sufficient relevant data. A good starting point is Google Analytics. It has a dedicated section about the interests of your site’s visitors broken down into different groups.
You can also utilize specialized management platforms that track consumer behavior via different technologies such as cookies. As for psychographic parameters, various social analysis tools could be of help. By searching the consumer bios for specific attributes, you can tailor the marketing content to fit their priorities, attitudes, or lifestyles as a whole.
2. Do Not Neglect SEO
Organic SEO growth could be considered a type of audience targeting and one that can produce enviable results. After all, being shown to the customer while they are searching for exactly the products or services you are offering means that you are targeting them at the perfect time as searching could indicate a buying intent. Check if your brand has a high ranking on any relevant terms and leverage them.
3. Check the Impact of the Targeting
It is wise to test the content you have prepared before making it live. Doing so can pinpoint areas that could be further optimized in their impact as well as mitigate potential risks. A helpful marketing technique in this area is A/B testing. It consists of carrying out an experiment where your audience is split into two groups – A and B, respectively.
They will be an integral part of a test run of the chosen content and asked to provide feedback. By taking into account the received feedback, you can further improve your marketing message by seeing which piece of content best aligns with the chosen audience segment and boosting its impact when it launches officially.
4. Implement Tracking
Seeing the behavior of consumers on your website could provide invaluable insights into their motivations and interests. By incorporating event tracking, you will learn how users interact with it, which website aspects are driving the most engagement, and what areas need to be improved or tweaked. Other captured data such as phone IDs may be utilized to infer the users’ geolocation and serve them ads appropriate for that region.
5. Take Advantage of the Available Tools
When creating your audience targeting strategy, you should consider all available options. For example, Google’s in-market audiences feature shows consumer groups actively searching for your products or services. You can try to identify high-performing Affinity Categories as well as In-Market Segments and create separate ad groups for each audience. Making decisions backed by data increases the chances of your messaging resonating with the desired customer group.
The Google Ads Editor is another tool that marketers can use to examine existing audiences and then establish remarketing or custom combination lists. Remarketing allows companies to connect with consumers who have previously expressed interest in their products or services by interacting with the official website, mobile app, or other content.
6. Personalize Ads for Various Audiences
Let’s say you have a really great and creative ad that could have a significant impact even on a general audience. You can then proceed to make it even more effective by including slight alterations that match different audience segments. For example, you can slightly change the original language of the ad and turn it into several, each talking to a different group of professionals. Making the audience feel targeted generates a stronger connection with the delivered content.
7. Don’t Think That the Process is Over
Audience targeting needs to be continuously and regularly refined to keep its effectiveness. Consumer interests change and evolve, motivations shift, and people relocate. You must be aware of the processes of change going on within your audience and then update your current marketing strategy accordingly.
In addition, you should always be asking questions about your audience, such as ‘Are we targeting the right audience segment?’, ‘Are we getting the intended response?’ and ‘Can we identify a different segment with overlapping parameters ?’ and trying to find the most accurate answers. Keeping an eye out for new and emerging technologies is equally as important as they could open avenues for novel and innovative ways to reach out and target audiences.