Relevant ad targeting can be the difference between a successful campaign and a waste of time and money. Smart targeting techniques are crucial parts of your content marketing strategy, allowing you to show your ad to an interested audience, rather than hoping someone random decides they’re interested. By narrowing your campaign’s focus, targeting can help you create meaningful connections with readers who are curious about your service or product.
Storytelling and Meaningful Connections
Effective ad targeting lets you tell stories that resonate with the reader. By connecting with them on a human level, your ad won’t feel like annoying clickbait that’s trying to scam them with impractical promises; instead, it will be a unique story that sticks with the reader and creates a meaningful connection.
Publix does a great job of using digital storytelling to create memorable connections that stick with their audience. Rather than singling out a specific age range, they hone in on families and emphasize the importance of togetherness. This is seen around the holidays in both their television and social media advertisements.
Great Targeting
You can create a more cost-effective campaign by narrowing your focus and targeting a refined audience. Mass advertising to anyone and everyone is a waste of money; target an audience that may already have an interest in your service or product.
Facebook advertising allows you to target based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and location. This means that ad campaigns can be run toward an audience who has already specifically stated their interest, which reduces your need to make an educated guess.
Location targeting can be great for local businesses trying to increase their presence in the community. For example, if you are advertising a local, family-owned pizza restaurant, heavy advertising in a small area close to the restaurant can increase local interest rather than sparsely advertising throughout the entire city. We can see this successfully played out with Publix. Their family holiday ads demonstrate the power of great targeting coupled with relevant digital storytelling.
Bad Targeting
When targeting is done wrong, it can have harmful consequences toward your return on investment and brand perception. For example, advertising a local Orlando electrician to everyone in Central Florida is too broad and not feasible for a local electrician who should only advertise around their business, or within an appropriate driving distance. The use of location targeting increases interest and awareness in the place you want to do business. Furthermore, children, renters, and college students typically do not need an electrician. By asking yourself who will use your service or product, you can narrow down who needs to see your ad.
Over specifying who you are targeting can be detrimental to your ad campaign, but not targeting closely enough can have you wasting money on people who do not care. There’s a fine line, and you can walk it by truly understanding who your potential customers are.
How To Define An Audience
Creating a target audience can be a strenuous task that simply put, is a guessing game. However, by analyzing your campaign and data you already have, those guesses can be refined and critiqued. At On Target, we are experts at this. Audience targeting can be an ever-changing process, even from month-to-month, so effective targeting is much easier with an agency’s expertise. On Target analyses your data and refines your targeting to strategically target the most successful areas and meet your goals. Our number one goal is to help brands discover their story and share it with their most relevant audience. If you are ready to transform your customer’s journey today, give us a call.
On Target is an Orlando based Digital Marketing Agency that helps brands stand out and rise above the noise. Through great storytelling, On Target turns companies into thought leaders. Founded in 2005 as a search engine marketing (SEO) firm, we’ve evolved into Orlando’s only agency that specializes in creating remarkable online content. If you’re looking to refresh your marketing strategy, contact us today.
About the Author:
Matthew is currently a student at the University of Central Florida and is studying Digital Media and Web Design. After completing his internship at On Target, he stayed on and now works as a Digital Marketing Assistant. In his free time, Matthew enjoys cooking, watching basketball and football, and spending time outside with friends and family.
