Where Are Your Customers?
Defining Your Target Market on Digital Media
No matter what your company does, defining your target market is crucial for marketing success. After all, a target market is just another name for customers. It represents the individuals who are most likely to purchase your products or services.
In digital marketing, once you understand who your target market is, you can begin tailoring your marketing efforts to reach them in the right place, in the most effective way, and in the most advantageous timeframe. If you know where your customers are, you ultimately increase your chances of increasing sales and profits.
Defining Your Target Market
Identifying your target market is the first step in finding and converting potential customers. To effectively identify your target market, start by creating an ideal customer profile. This profile can include demographic information such as age, gender, income, and location. But psychographic details are even more critical. Make a list of their interests, values, and lifestyle choices. Think about how they absorb information and process messages. For example, analytical engineers will respond to one communication style, while people looking for electric guitars may appreciate a different approach. Understanding these aspects of your target market will help you tailor your marketing efforts to meet their needs and preferences better.
While demographics can be important, digital media advertising tools have become hesitant to share such data with advertisers. For example, few online advertising tools allow advertisers to target based on race or religion. Even when gender and age are targeting options, the tool will send the message only to people who match the information. For example, if an ad wants to reach people 65 and older, but only 50% of users have specified an age, the ad will reach fewer people. If age is a critical factor in marketing, it may be wiser to target by psychographics or behaviors associated with age instead of specifying it.
Psychographics and interest delve deeper into the motivations and preferences of your target market. When targeting your customers' interests, values, and lifestyle choices, you can create marketing campaigns that resonate with them on a deeper level. For instance, if you want to reach consumers 65+ but don't want to use the age qualifier (for reasons explained above), you may target by interests such as retirement, wrinkles, health conditions, or Medicaid.
If you're unsure who your best target market is, you may want to invest in surveys, interviews, and analytics tools that can help you gather data. Surveys and interviews can provide direct feedback from customers, while analytics tools can track customer behavior on your website and social media channels. By analyzing this data, you can gain valuable insights into the preferences and behaviors of your target market, allowing you to refine your marketing strategy and better meet their needs.
Understanding Digital Audiences
Digital audiences in online advertising refer to specific groups of individuals targeted with ads based on various criteria such as their online behavior, demographics, interests, and more. Whoever creates the ad can create and save digital audiences within each campaign to be used again when desired.
There are several types of digital audiences commonly used in online advertising. One type is a custom audience. The advertiser chooses a set of parameters, including location, social media profile information, interests, titles, or past online behaviors. The advertiser can then save this custom audience to use again and again.
Customer audiences can be created by uploading lists of customer emails. The advertiser can send ads to this custom audience if the platform can match enough emails (usually 2,000)
Lookalikes can be created using custom lists, website visitors, or people who have seen or reacted to your ads in the past. Lookalike audiences use these source emails to create a new digital audience of millions of potential customers. These audiences are likely to be interested in similar products or services, making them a valuable target for advertising campaigns customers who look, act, and react in ways that are similar to the core audience. In Cup O Content's experience, lookalike audiences often outperform the core audiences.
Retargeting audiences are created by compiling users who have previously visited a website but did not take a desired action, such as purchasing. Retargeting ads are then displayed to these users as they browse other websites, encouraging them to return and complete the desired action. While this is a popular type of audience, as of this writing, some platforms are limiting the functionality of such audiences to address privacy concerns.
Testing Digital Audiences
Understanding the effectiveness of your digital audiences is a foundational part of running a successful ad campaign. At Cup O Content, we recommend that clients continually test and learn, trying out new types of audiences, audience compositions, and more. By testing the impact of various kinds of audiences, such as customer audiences, lookalike audiences, and retargeting audiences, advertisers can refine their targeting strategies and maximize the impact of their campaigns.
Customer Audiences: Once the audience is created, monitor the performance of your ads targeted to this audience, including metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS). It's also smart to create campaigns that send the same ads to two types of audiences to see how the two audiences compare. When an advertiser continually tests two or more audiences for each campaign, they'll learn a lot about who responds to messages, how effective messaging is to different audiences, and even discover new qualifying interests or behaviors to include in the client's target market profile.
Lookalike Audiences: Monitor the performance of ads targeted to this lookalike audience, comparing it to the performance of ads targeted to your core audience and other audience types.
We often find lookalike audiences outperform custom audiences, making them a valuable target for advertising campaigns.
It's also smart to test different messages to lookalike audiences. It's a great way to discover which messages are best for converting new customers.
Retargeting Audiences: As usual, monitor the performance of these ads, focusing on metrics such as click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition. Retargeting sometimes shares information on website type, so over time, it becomes easier for specific sites or interest categories to improve performance.
Want to Learn More?
Defining target audiences and creating a digital audience is one of the most pivotal parts of digital marketing. Get it right, and your sales will soar. Get it wrong, and you'll struggle to grow. If you want to learn more about utilizing digital audiences for your product or service, contact Cup O Content today.
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