Audience Targeting and Segmentation

 

Business is an engine and marketing work as a fuel to run it

Be it a small-medium enterprise or a big multinational giant, it is indispensable for every kind of business. No business can run longer without doing a bit of marketing activity, after all sales, branding, industry size, business growth, are directly related to marketing.

As marketing is rapidly shifting towards the digital sphere and marketers have already adopted digital marketing platforms to attract their audiences. Some are getting excellent results from the digital marketing efforts, and some are still struggling to drive sales from the same.

What is audience targeting in digital marketing?

Let’s assume your business deals in women’s beauty products, manufacturing and selling. You have a B2C business and you sell directly to the customers (online or offline). Your target is women in your service area. So, you will market your products to women only, not anyone else.

Similarly, for a B2C business like NewsVoir which provides press release distribution services, target audiences will be listed companies, small and medium-sized businesses, big corporates or brands and PR agencies.

Target audience is nothing but the category of people who will most likely buy your products/services.

Why is audience targeting important in digital marketing?

There are 7 billion+ people on this earth and everyone has different names, age, color, interests, hobbies, habits, likes and dislikes. Will you try to talk to everybody regarding your business?

No, because if you do so you will end up with losing your time and money and eventually you will get nothing much out of it. Not everybody can be interested in the products or services you provide.

So, you need to find out and categorize your target audience to reach and talk to relevant people only with your marketing exercise. Every business has a target audience, and every marketer has to identify and segment that.

How to identify the target audience in digital marketing?

To attract the right people and convert them into leads and then to a paying customer, a marketer needs to do comprehensive research on identifying the target audience.

The first step in this process is “Building Buyers Persona”.

Remember when we were in high school and our science teacher used to tell us to assume an imaginary character to understand topics more efficiently. We will do the same here in marketing by assuming an imaginary buyer who is most likely to buy your products or services.
But it should not be assumed randomly, there should be well researched data and reason behind it.

First, ask yourself these questions

* What are the demographics of your buyer?

It includes their age, gender, location, education level, marital status and religion etc.

* What is socioeconomic status?

It means their source of income, total income, occupation and economic status in society.

* How do your buyers engage with brands?

Yes, if they have used products of your competitor, then how do they find it? What is their interaction with brands?

* What is the psychographics and benefits they sought?

Understand the emotions and personality. Know how the person is going to benefit from your product/service.

* What is the primary source of influence?

Identify the source of influence which can affect the shopping decision of your buyer.

 

When you answer these questions, you will have an ideal buyer ready. Now, you just need more people like this and list them as a target audience.

As they say, “You can easily search for something, when you know what you are looking for.”

Conduct Research and Analysis

To create an ideal buyer persona, your journey doesn’t end here. In fact, it doesn’t end anywhere, but you will have to conduct time to time research and do analysis to get updated data about your target audience.

To conduct research to build audience persona, you can use some of these methods:

1. Online surveys

These are the best sources to gather information from random people and know their interest, opinion, and views on something. This way, you can easily find out who is relevant for your business and who is not. Google Forms is the best tool for this.

2. Influencers / Interviews / Webinars

Social media influencers can help you find choices, likes and dislikes of people because they have a loyal audience and they can easily get what you are looking for. Later they can be used as a marketing channel for influencer marketing.

Interviewing people directly and organizing webinars can be a little tedious, but they provide real-time and authentic insights to the audience’s views.

3. Web Analytics & Social Media Monitoring

Using web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush etc are the goldmine of data to understand the behaviour of people. They provide insights about the online behaviours of a person who reacts with your business online.

Using media monitoring tools, you can listen to your audience’s discussion on social media platforms.

4. Talk to sales team

Last but not least, your sales team who interacts with a lot of prospects daily. They can give you actual insights about the queries, interests and behaviours of people who are looking for the products/services which your business offers.

Begin with audience targeting in digital marketing

If you have already identified your target audience and you have collected a handful of information about your audience who you want to reach with a marketing campaign.

The question is how to choose a perfect platform for your marketing campaigns which can provide all segmentation options and filters which you require targeting your audience. Go ahead and choose a platform to test the target audience identified by you.

The goal of testing is to check whether the chosen set of audience works well with your Ads or not?

Here we shall discuss the different targeting options provided by all marketing platforms. We will focus on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Instagram Ads

1. Google Ads

Google Ads is one of the greatest tools to promote and grow your business digitally. It gives you extensive options to explore every possibility of reaching your customers with your offerings. It’s essential to spend time on exploring the tool and setting up a Google Ad account perfectly before starting your campaigns.

Let’s dive deeper into the targeting options provided by Google Ads.

There are two categories under which you can select and target people to see your Ads:

1. Audience based targeting

2. Content based targeting

 

Audience based targeting

Audience based targeting is the option to decide your audience who will see your Ad (that is your content). There are a lot of filtering options to set your target audience based on various parameters. These parameters are Interest based targeting,

Affinity audience, occupation, gender, location and demographics targeting etc.

Interest based targeting options in Google Ads

Content based targeting

Second kind of targeting option available is content based targeting. Mostly Google Ads campaigns work on this kind of targeting. Here, you can’t decide your audience persona, but you can decide what content you want to target.

These elements work for the content targeting-

  • Topics
  • Placement 
  • Content Keywords

Here, content keywords are the most important factor. The quality of keywords you choose for your Ad will decide the number of impressions, clicks and conversions for your campaign.

You need to use Google’s keyword planner for optimising your keywords. Also, you can use forecast features to get a rough idea about performance of your campaigns.

2. Facebook Ads

Facebook has 2.8 billion total active users and 1.84 billion are visiting the website daily. Facebook claims they are 89% accurate with paid ads targeting.

For small businesses, Facebook is the best platform to start an online advertising journey because it provides options to start with a lower budget and target a very narrow audience. This is the reason Facebook generates more revenue from ads as compared to any other of its competitors.

Defining audience in Facebook Ads

They designed audience targeting in Facebook in such a way that a user can choose either a broad audience to increase brand awareness or select a narrower target audience to get leads and conversions to business.

Based on following criteria, users can target their audience:

  • Location:

Setting the location of your viewer who you want to notice your business is significantly necessary. You will have options to choose country, state, city or even specific locations to target the people. Locations based targeting works best when you are promoting a local business.

  • Behaviour:

People spend significant time on using the Facebook platform, so the app has a lot of data about the digital behaviour of users. Knowing consumer behaviour is important when you design any marketing campaign, so Facebook helps you to know these things prior to setting your campaigns.

  • Demographics:

Setting audience demographics works similarly as in the other platforms. You have options to choose from age, gender, profession, education or job title. The metrics are easily available on Facebook and help advertisers to reach specific audiences.

  • Connections:

You can even choose to reach people who already like or follow your business on Facebook or the people who don’t know about your business.

  • Interests:

You can even target people based on their interests and hobbies. For example, if you want to reach people who have interests in online games, then this parameter is best for you.

It is easy to build your first Facebook Ad campaign, but it’s difficult to get best results out of that campaign for your business. Let’s connect on Facebook with each other to get regular updates about the trends of the industry.

Over to you

Targeting audience and user segmentation plays a crucial role in the digital marketing campaigns. Many of the newbies make mistakes in the very beginning by not giving attention to building an audience. A wrongly chosen audience can waste all the Ad budget and make your Ad campaign a complete failure.

As an informed digital marketer, it’s your job to experiment with these parameters and build a perfect audience for your next ad campaigns.

NewsVoir uses similar audience targeting to bring online media visibility for your brand or business. We have a curated list of industry wise media portals which gives your business a recognition and more authority in public who are interested in your business.

Looking for media coverage for your business? Let’s talk.

4 thoughts on “Role of Audience Targeting and Segmentation Through Digital Channels”

  1. kd master says:

    This blog is amazing! thanks for sharing

  2. I do not even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great.

  3. Rich Smith says:

    Thanks for sharing. This is a great article!

  4. Bonny Forbes says:

    This is an important article and a major aspect of any business of any kind. Well, a business is nothing without customers, and also, what’s the meaning of having customers who don’t relate themselves with the business. So defining the targeted audience and understanding their behaviour pattern is a lot helpful to the business. Absolutely a great article, I would say.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *