“With so many options, Advertising networks like Facebook & Google Ads can be confusing. Especially for growing businesses. The key to remember is, digital marketing is all about reaching the most fitting audience in a given time.”, says Priyanka, co-founder of Teamic.
It is easy to get lost in the overload of information available on the internet regarding activating online ads. The term keyword is commonly talked about and its role in landing successful ads. And rightly so, keyword research helps in increasing the chances of viewer action or even purchase by a lot. But the purchase is not alone based on advertising keywords. The true power of online advertising is its ability to cater to a concise audience.
How to identify your Target Audience for better marketing?
Every advertising campaign on Google Ads or Facebook is targeted to a specific set of people. What is a target audience? And why does your specific target audience matter? That's what we're going to cover today. Should you focus on a broad audience or narrow it? What is the audience persona? Which is the right platform for my business?
Let’s start by understanding what Target Audience is. The people who fit in as your potential customers are regarded as the Target Audience.
And why is it necessary to identify your Target Audience?
When you run a business, a specific group of people falls under your customer arena. The obvious goal of advertising your business is to attract a relevant crowd who are looking out for services that you provide. Marketing your services to everyone might get your advertisement a huge number of likes, but it will fail to connect with the right audience. Therefore, knowing your target group is the master key to upscale your biz. You should focus on these people or precisely your potential customers through marketing means to convert them into your actual customers.
Identifying your target audience is essential to reach the right customers, market effectively, and skyrocket your sales.
What is Target Audience Segmentation?
Target Audience segmentation is a practice of subgrouping your audience relatively based on demographic, geographical, behavioral, and psychological factors. When creating campaigns tailored to unique subgroups and selecting the target audience based on their interests, Target Audience Segmentation proves to be efficacious.
Marketing with the right audience in mind is the trick!
Think for a second, you are creating a Facebook ad campaign for a Ladies Beauty Salon. Now, the ideal market segmentation will be targeting the women crowd in the vicinity. Delivering your salon ad to an area way off the limits of your radius will be all for naught.
Using Facebook features to limit your audience based on geographic location and other focusing factors will improve your campaign efforts. Moreover, depending on your marketing agenda you can set an income limit, target men or women, and eliminate anyone who doesn't fit your potential customers.
Types of Target Audience
Google and Facebook have various options to filter audiences from. The digital advertisement offers plenty of attributes and characteristics to target the right audience for your product and services. As you set the stake by mentioning the age, income, education, gender, specific region, etc. of your target audience, the algorithm automatically prepares to display the ads only to the pre-decided audience. It saves you both budget and time.
The attributes can be divided into six large categories, which are as follows.
Demographic
This group includes user's social-economic data such as age, income, geolocation, education and gender. This demographic data makes it easier for you to target a qualified audience. For eg, you can target specifically for the age group of 25-30, only females from towns with a population of 30,000.
Psychographic
Psychographic segregation consists of the user's psychology, as in hobbies, passions, things that they are looking forward to going to, or are going to read about. It can be their hobbies, desire, craving, or passion. It can be about music, cars, books, traveling, fashion, cars, politics, dance, etc. This is a persuasive tool that helps you to understand the user's mind, how to engage them and what product or service they will be interested in. For example, you can offer them a discount on their next trip or offer a book on parenting for first-time parents.
Behavioural
Data is of utmost significance for smooth e-commerce. With the help of tracking online behavior, it is easier to bifurcate and target the relevant audience who recently looked for a product similar to yours. It fuels their willingness to buy your product/services with more knowledge about the product they wish to buy. For example, targeting a person who just googled about buying a car, went to your website, and saw a specific car, then visited Youtube to check the reviews.
Contextual
This type of targeting refers to the context setting in which viewers should see the given ad. It means, choosing the content which will accompany the ad, eg. books to read. The topic and the keyword have relevance with the websites where it will appear or an app where it will be displayed.
Geotargeting
Geotargeting uses the GPS and IP address, to display ads to the user who has visited, is nearby, or is situated near a particular location. Ads are served to anyone browsing the web via desktop or cellphones in that area. with the help of georeferencing. This tool is beneficial for targeting neighborhood users, businesses, or events.
Retargeting
Retargeting means reminding the user who has previously visited or used your website, who is interested in your ads, contacted via email, or has taken some other relevant steps. With this data, you can target them with the same ad or a new one to turn them into a customer.
Additionally, Facebook also allows users to create Lookalike & Custom audience.
Well, that was all about the Target Audience! Now, let’s see the approach to do it aptly.
How to define your Target Audience?
Concentrating on your target market is crucial when it comes to building and maintaining a strong business. After all, most products and services have a natural or obvious realm of commercialization. But success in today's competitive world is more than knowing the “basics” of people you are targeting.
Be it Google or Facebook, your advertising efforts are all in vain if you try to please everybody. Your time, energy, and money are invested more efficiently if you learn how to define your audience, and can be done by deploying the best audience targeting strategies. Mentioned below are different ways to help you understand your customer's wants, goals, and challenges, making it easier for your business to truly capture their attention.
Build an Audience Persona
The key to creating an audience persona is to fully understand the customer and find out their wants. Spending time studying your audience helps you to figure out their wants and apply them to your business growth strategy.
When dealing with your target customer, you should be aware of their demographic details, their interests, geographical location, and other relative data. It will help you understand your target market and determine how to approach and communicate with your audience via different social media channels. This will enable you to create content that your customers expect and will engage with.
Study your current customer base.
Surveying your current clientele will provide you with tons of data. You can use it to prepare the questions that will help you set your target audience.
But remember, your clients have busy lives. Keep your questionnaire concise and specific.
You could ask questions that focus on:
The pressing issues regarding the niche
The amount they are willing to pay for the services/products
Social media sites your clients devote maximum time to
The responses to these questions can be used for marketing purposes.
Audience Engagement.
Having a good number of followers and likes is one thing and having an engaging audience is a totally different thing.
Content marketing is crucial across the business sector for a good reason. It not only generates traffic but also opens up conversation topics.
How often do you respond to feedback or comments on your blog or social media posts? Initiate communication with your audiences, and go beyond the basic conversation. It is vitally important for businesses to engage in conversations and listen to their customers. Listen for their expectations from your brands, questions, and criticisms. They may give you ideas on what your ideal customer wants, thinks, and needs.
Social media channels are amazing when it comes to interacting with your followers. You can take polls asking them about their issues, share opinions to resolve their problems, or even come up with daily tips to keep them motivated. Efforts to keep your clients engaged will maintain their trust in you and that will go A LONG WAY!
Find out who is not your Target Audience.
Having a clear idea of the wrong audience is as important as knowing who the right ones are. Every business has a clientele sphere, and knowing your exact target audience is useful when you advertise through search or social media, in particular.
Eliminate prospects who do not belong to your brand's buyer persona. Identify who does not merit your time and attention.
For example, let’s consider a marketing campaign for a ‘protein shake’. This eliminates the non-fitness-freak population.
Every person who is a gym freak or is planning to start fitness falls under the category of ideal customers. The rest of the population needs to be eliminated.
By keeping your target audience specific, you can increase the chances of your marketing creatives reaching the right audience boosting your campaign success. Also, you significantly reduce your campaign efforts to reach large stretches of Facebook-using crowds.
Analyze your competitive position
Analyzing your competitor’s behavior does not necessarily mean to 24/7 spy on them and create content similar to them. It means to learn their growth strategies, learning from their mistakes, and adapting to their successful methodologies. Monitoring your competitors helps you to understand your competitive position and fine-tuning necessary aspects to scale up your rank amongst your competitors.
Discover their home page, landing pages, zip pages, and product descriptions. Determine what they are not doing so you can provide your target audience with something your competitors are missing out on.
Moreover, a sneak peek into exploring how your competitors work, what kind of content they post on social media, and researching links to their sites may provide you with beneficial information.
If your competitors appear to be reaching their target market, they are on the right path. You can study do’s and don’ts to refine your ideal audience.
Create content that speaks to your Target Audience
The next step after defining your target audience is to create engaging content. This holistic approach to how you create content should be coherent across all your social network handles.
A few EASY Ways to create content that speaks to your Target Audience.
Keep it SIMPLE and CRISP
Don’t forget to add an element of UNIQUENESS
Focus on content VISIBILITY
Create content that is COMPELLING
Feed your audience with RELATABLE content.
Target them with advertising campaigns.
An excellent way to rapidly reach the maximum of your target audience is to use paid advertisements. Generating inorganic traffic can put a huge dent in your marketing budget, if not managed properly. But, if you have specified your target audience, you will be able to advertise more accurately, which will probably reduce the cost of the campaign.
Here are two excellent media purchasing platforms for you to use:
Facebook Ads
Google Ads
Summary
Customers these days aren’t passive spectators, they actively interact with the media in various ways and decide their exposure to advertising. Discovering your target audience, focusing on their engagement through quality content, interacting with them, and providing them with a personalized brand view will keep your customers satisfied, thus helping your business grow.
Now, you know a lot more about how Target Audiences are defined in online advertising and its significance. And we’re sure you're looking forward to trying them out. It can however feel lost in the numerous options you have in targeting advertisements. You can always turn to specialized agencies like Teamic who are dedicated to helping small businesses. Teamic is a social media agency with an emphasis on growing and emerging companies.
We believe in the power of social data and its contribution to the business.
We hope to provide access to growing businesses with data infrastructure to help bridge the gap between start-ups and large enterprises!