Winning Targeting Strategies: Reach Your Audience
What is the key ingredient that makes a marketing campaign successful? Choose from the list below:
Carefully crafted branding
A stand-out product
Striking content
Precision targeting
In truth, there is no one ingredient that will ensure the success of your marketing campaign. A truly successful marketing campaign will combine all of the elements above. Yet, many marketers focus heavily on the content of their campaign, forgetting of course that it is the combination of quality content marketed to the right target audience that ultimately leads to results.
Take for example an advert for home insurance. If you mistakenly chose to send your offer, no matter how competitive it was, to people who didn't own a home, it's highly unlikely you would see a return on your marketing efforts - the target audience you've chosen is simply wrong.
Examples of Targeting Strategies in Marketing
If you want to be sure to reach the right target audience, you need to consider a number of factors before arriving at the right audience targeting strategy. Ask yourself these questions:
What is the objective of your marketing campaign?
If you're working towards the top of the funnel and are trying to create brand awareness, you're potentially less focused on running highly targeted campaigns and instead are focused on increasing your reach. Take for example TV, Radio and Digital Audio which offer only limited options for targeting but are great channels for reaching a large audience with highly-impactful content.
If however you're working towards the bottom of the funnel on direct response, this will require a more targeted approach. For that you'll need to consider using data in your marketing campaigns from a data provider such as LBDigital.
How much budget do you have allocated to this campaign?
Smaller budgets often require more targeting because there are fewer impressions served. You don't want to waste budget serving ads to the wrong target audience so make sure you have identified exactly who it is you want to reach before beginning your campaign.
Who are your customers?
You want to reach people who look & behave like them, whatever it takes. That means analyzing your existing customer base and drawing insights from the data.
Imagine for example you're a marketer at a chain of restaurants and on analyzing your CRM data, you realise you have 3 different types of customers with different marketing profiles:
business professionals who dine with you regularly for lunch midweek
families who often dine in your restaurants at the weekend
couples who sometimes dine at your restaurants on a Friday or Saturday evening
With these marketing profiles, you can also identify which type of customer is most valuable for your business. In the above scenario, it is likely to be the business professional who is most important to your business. They dine with you regularly, often bringing with them new clients, but they also dine at a time where you're most quiet. Friday, Saturday nights and weekends in general are usually already busy times for restaurants.
What does this mean for your marketing campaign? Not only do you want to keep your business professional customers loyal, you want to find more potential customers like them.
Now you're working on a data-driven marketing campaign. You can start to use data from trusted data providers like LBDigital to enrich your existing database and make your marketing more targeted.
What has worked well in the past?
Don't be afraid of taking inspiration from past campaigns. You don't need to re-invent the wheel each time you start a campaign. On the contrary, data from past campaigns are a key indicator of how you should target in the future.
Have you seen for example that your customers and prospects respond well to email marketing sent at midday? Use that little nugget to help ensure your next campaign performs well. With continuous testing, analyzing, learning and tweaking, you can increase the overall performance of your marketing campaigns.
5. What time of year are you planning to run your campaign?
Can you make your marketing campaign even more targeted and relevant to your target audience by ensuring it's also timely? For instance, during the holiday season, it’s a great idea to send your beard trimmer offer to females as a gift offer for the men in their lives.
Or you can try some moment marketing: having the right offer available just as someone is in market for a specific product. Here at LBDigital, we have a "Triggerpoint" segment available which contains new mover contact data - ideal for companies looking to sell Cable TV, internet services or home decor services.
Best Practices for Audience Targeting
The beauty of digital advertising and digital marketing is that hundreds of strategies can be included per campaign. In our experience at LBDigital, the best practice is to monitor campaign performance daily and weekly, make adjustments or turn off strategies that are underperforming, and turn up budget on those strategies that meet or exceed your KPI.
This is the best way to judge targeting success vs cost and ensures you reduce wastage.
Get in Touch!
If you're not sure whether your current targeting strategies are working and would like to discuss how they could be improved in the future, drop us a line. We have 15 years' experience helping companies to hone their audience targeting and would love to share our data expertise with you!
