Digital Marketing Expert's Audience Targeting Tactics

Gone are the days of putting out information into the digital space without consideration for your target audience. Audience targeting strategies are an essential part to everything that we do as digital marketers, and rightfully so!

Integrating effective targeting strategies means you’re a lot more likely to reach an audience that’s interested in your products or services. They allow your business to spend your dollars more efficiently and make sure that ad spend isn’t going to waste.

Isn’t that what every business wants?

Our team of digital marketing experts certainly thinks so!

Targeting Strategies from Digital Marketing Experts

We’ve put together this list of eight audience targeting strategies to use in your digital advertising efforts. Whether you’re a small business or a larger business focused on performance marketing campaigns, you’re bound to reap the rewards of focusing on certain audience groups.

Location Targeting

One of the best places to start when it comes to trying out targeting strategies is with location targeting.

Location targeting means putting a focus on certain geographic areas. These areas are chosen based on where your target audience mainly resides.

Location targeting also means you can restrict certain locations from seeing your ads too. These are usually locations that aren’t relevant to your product or service offerings.

You can get very specific with location targeting by selecting a country, city, or even an exact zip code.

Demographic Targeting

One of the most commonly known types of targeting is demographic targeting. These targeting features allow you to select traits that you find are relevant to your business.

The more relevant demographics you select, the better you’re able to reach the specific audience that’s going to interact with your brand.

Demographics could include anything from gender and age to language and interests.

Let’s say you own a dog grooming business, for example. You could include those who show interest in dogs or are pet owners. The demographic targeting features only seem to become more sophisticated with time!

Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences take interests even further. An affinity audience is a type of audience you can reach based on a look at their habits and lifestyle. They’re the type of audience that proves to have a very focused passion towards a certain topic.

This type of audience can be beneficial to us as digital marketers. They allow us to reach the most relevant people for certain product or service offerings. We’re able to develop a better understanding of their identity and can use that information to target them directly.

PS. Affinity audiences are most valuable for building brand awareness.

Custom Affinity Audiences

You can take affinity audiences one step further by building your own, based on URLs.

Users will visit certain websites, download specific apps, and do all types of things online you can use to your advantage. Simply collect this info to create categories and reach this broad but customizable audience.

Custom affinity audiences are best for branding purposes, advertising, and increasing market reach. At the same time, they continue to drive traffic and actions on your site. There are many ways to customize URLs, places, apps and interests to use in your targeting strategies.

Similar Audiences

Similar audiences are a great targeting strategy to use and is especially helpful in the search for new audiences. The idea is  you find new customers who are like your existing customers and then show your ads to the selected group.

Similar audiences are perfect for those who have established a list of customers who commonly convert and are looking to grow that list. They take the guessing games out of the search for new valuable customers by automatically doing it for you!

Technology such as the Google algorithms have become very sophisticated in watching online behaviors. They help you find exactly who might be interested in your products or services.

Remarketing Audiences

Relevancy is everything when it comes to digital advertising! And this problem is solved with remarketing audiences. You can customize your search ad campaigns so you’re reaching people who have actually interacted with your brand.

Platforms like Facebook will go as far as to allow you to see options on user’s click-through rates, cost-per-clicks, and conversions so you can see exactly the type of audience that’s most interested in your business.

Once this group has been established, they can be remarketed to. They are more likely to convert because of their awareness and previous interactions.

Customer Match

Customer match is a great tool because it allows you to use both your online and offline customer data files. Combining the data from these sources means having a plethora of targeting options all in one place.

You can create targeted ads for this combined audience as well as other groups just like them!

In-Market Audiences

As user’s browse the web, records are made of their actions and interests in certain markets. In-market audiences is an area that uses this information to help you determine who’s interested in the general market your business operates in.

These users could be researching products within your market, be in the consideration phase of products within your market, or even making purchases or products and services that are similar to yours.

In-market audiences take affinity audiences to the next level. It involves targeting those who are already on their way to completing a purchase. These high-value customers are especially useful to target because they are so much more likely to convert.

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