Proper audience targeting in paid marketing
Paid campaigns are one of the most effective tools in any digital marketer’s kit. However, while they may be effective, they are also a high-risk - high-reward tactic as they need a budget unlike other types of organic marketing channels.
Given the stakes involved, it is vital for any digital marketer worth their salt to understand what is perhaps one of the two most important parts of any paid campaign - audience targeting.
When building any audience, there are always some conundrums that many digital marketers face. Today, we will take a look at one of the biggest conundrums - narrow vs. broad audience targeting approaches.
In an age where data has become one of the most valuable commodities on the planet, it is important to know how to use it to build your audience. While there are any number of interests, demographic, in-market segments, affinity segments etc. available on tools like Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads etc., it is important to strike a balance between choosing an audience in terms of the level of specificity and the reach of the audience.
What can you expect from a broad audience targeting strategy?
Reaching a huge group of individuals across varied characteristics, tastes, places, etc. is necessary for broad marketing. To achieve this, you must create an appeal with the features of the product that all of these various groups will find appealing, such as the pricing or the range of available options. The key benefit of this strategy is that it will allow you to communicate with a lot of individuals, which can enhance brand equity in consumers' minds even if it doesn't result in an immediate sale. This brings up the biggest drawback of broad marketing strategies, which is that you can only expect a small portion of those you reach to convert. A broader message that appeals to multiple groups will be less likely to resonate with people further down the funnel.
What can you get from a narrow audience targeting strategy?
To reach the right audience with the right message at the right time, narrow reach marketing focuses on a particular market of consumers. The drawback is that you will only reach a smaller audience. However, because they will have a better comprehension of the solution you are providing and believe that your brand truly understands the demands of that specific segment of consumers, these individuals are often more likely to convert.
So what is the correct solution?
As with everything else in life, moderation is the key. For a good audience to be constructed, you need to make sure that you narrow the audience just enough so that you don’t waste too much of your budget on the irrelevant audience but not narrow it so much that it leaves out potential new audiences in the future.
Here are a few things that you can do as a part of your balanced approach
- Prioritise In-Store Visits
If you sell through a physical location, make sure that the primary marketing objective is to boost in-store visits as it will help a lot with word-of-mouth awareness and can help with other organic channels as well. - Manage Frequency
While there may be a tendency to show your ads to people as many times as you can, make sure that like the audience, the frequency is capped to have a balance in terms of the number of times the same member of your audience can see the ad. The idea is to not show it to them so many times that they would consider it to be spam but enough times so that there is sufficient brand recall. - Keep A Track Of KPIs
While everything we have discussed so far is a must-do in order to have success in running paid campaigns, the one thing above all that can optimise your campaign once it has begun is tracking the quantifiable metrics like the spend, reach, impressions, key results, cost per key result etc. These metrics will help you understand whether the targeting and ads you have chosen are working the way you need them to or if you need to make some changes.