If you’re someone who spends time on YouTube, are you as intrigued as I am about all these influencers creating back-to-school videos every time a new school year is about to start? I noticed this one day when my daughter was watching videos of one of her favourite YouTubers (on repeat, naturally).
Curious, I went through her channel and noticed how she had made numerous back-to-school videos, even when it was clear as day that she wasn’t in school.
Quite like other seasoned marketers, she had clearly identified the utility of audience targeting and was going to town with it.
That said, curating your content to a specific demographic is just one aspect of audience targeting; we use this kind of marketing strategy for many different reasons. Let’s do a quick dive into how audience targeting can boost your marketing efforts.
Audience targeting is a method of segmentation
When you use targeting tactics in your marketing strategy, the goal is to break a large market into smaller segments and concentrate on a specific group of customers within that audience.
If your marketing efforts target everyone, you’re going to have a hard time connecting with the right audience. Using vague and generic messages is far less likely to resonate with audiences compared to targeted, direct communication. That’s why audience targeting is important.
By defining a segment of customers based on their unique characteristics, you’re able to connect with a specific and defined audience. There are four main types of audience targeting tactics:
- Demographic segmentation: targeting age, gender, education, marital status, race or religion.
- Psychographic segmentation: targeting values, beliefs, interests, personality or lifestyle.
- Behavioural segmentation: targeting purchasing or spending habits, user status or brand interactions.
- Geographic areas: targeting a neighbourhood, area code, city, region or country.
One company that really nails audience segmentation is Netflix. Just take a look at the screenshots below:
Using different social media handles, Netflix is targeting different audiences to promote their content.
Google Ads Help further explains that, “You can add audience targeting to ad groups and reach people based on who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching, or how they have interacted with your business.”
Here are a few tips you need to keep in mind when experimenting with audience targeting in your marketing strategy.
Make good use of analytics and data
For free, useful resources, Google is always on top. Using Google Analytics, you can now identify the various traits of the people who visit your website.
When you explore your analytics, you’re able to understand how to tailor your content to specific demographics including people with different interests, passions, and even careers.
Even if these demographics are unrelated to your business, you can integrate these concepts into your marketing strategy for increased sales and leads.
Create content that appeals to your target audience
When you create content for target audiences, your content needs to be relevant and useful.
If you find that your audiences engage well with certain types of content like Instagram posts or certain blog posts, make these part of your marketing strategy.
When you identify the platform on which you have the most engagement, make it the primary focus of your strategy. In doing so, you’re able to target specific interests by meeting audiences where they prefer to engage with your business.
Personalise a creative ‘master ad’ for different audiences
Running personalised ads is a very cool (and effective) way to diversify content for your audience.
You can achieve this by taking a general ad and tweaking it for various audiences. This way, you make your audiences feel like you are talking to them, which is what audience targeting does.
For example, if you’re posting an ad on LinkedIn for marketers, you can customise the same ad for sales and customer service reps. If you’re sending out marketing emails, you can diversify similar content to appeal to your audiences directly.
A marketing strategy + targeting specific audiences = high ROI
Once you understand who your target audience is and the type of content they like to engage with, all that’s left to do is create the content you need.
You must, however, remember to keep your buyer persona in mind at all times. This is how your targeted ads and content can drive a high ROI.
Get in touch with WebGeek and make use of our marketing support services to transform your business and discover fresh ways to connect with your target audiences.