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May 12, 2024
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One of the most essential factors when developing a paid ad campaign is crafting solid and strategic targeted audiences. The right content in front of the wrong people isn’t going to do you any good.
In this article, we’ll walk through the process of creating the perfect targeted audience for your campaign and why each step is so important. Let’s get started.
"Knowing your target audience is the first step in setting your paid ad up for success. "
Deepu Thomas
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, INDIRAP
Demographics: Classification that defines a person or audience by their basic information, such as age, gender, or preferred language.
Psychographics: Classification that defines a person or audience by their interests or behaviors, such as hobbies, traits, or aspirations.
A/B Split Testing: Running the same campaign ad with multiple sets of creative in order to test the market and see which one performs better.
KPIs: Key Performance Indicators – the keys to developing strategy. These are the goals you set and the results you monitor to measure the success of a campaign. Such as Conversion Rates, Unique Website Traffic, Landing Page Conversions.
Before you do anything, you need to develop a strategy. No exceptions. We have clients come to us all the time wanting to boost random social posts or put money behind a video they’re putting out. Could you do that? Sure. But at the end of the day, it’s a waste of your money.
If you’re spending your hard-earned money, you should be seeing the pay-off and reaping the rewards. The only way to do this is to set a precise goal and craft your campaign around how to achieve that goal.
Do you want to drive more unique visitors to your site? Do you want to increase conversions? Maybe you just want to improve your brand’s recognizability. Every goal is going to require a different plan of attack and a diverse audience set. You start with your strategy and build out from there; shortcuts just won’t cut it.
Once you have your strategy, it’s time to take an honest look at your brand. Let’s say your goal is to drive traffic to your website. How appealing is your website? Can it handle an influx of visitors? Is it designed to move potential customers further down the sales funnel? Is it too overwhelming and easy to get lost?
The worst thing you can do is run a successful campaign and then trip right before you reach the finish line. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Assess where you’re at with brutal honesty and adjust until you’re prepared for success.
Okay, so you’ve developed a strategy, you’ve laid the groundwork for a successful campaign, now let’s talk about what goes into creating a targeted audience.
As you can probably tell from the name, location-based targeting will allow you to determine who will see your ads based on where they live. Meaning you can focus on specific towns, cities, or states at small or large radii. For example, if you’re running a small local gym in Scottsdale and your goal is to get more memberships, paying for people in Tuscon to see your ad is just money down the drain.
Demographics are the basic details that form who a person is.
– Age
– Gender
– Preferred Language
Narrowing down these factors should be relatively straightforward. As a brand, you’re most likely already aware of who your target market is. But again, go back to your strategy and assess from there. Maybe you’re a bar running a ladies’ night promo; in that case, you’d clearly be targeting your ads towards women over men. If you’re ever unsure, revert to your strategy and go from there.
These targeted audiences tactics can be a bit more challenging to narrow down and requires more consideration. Psychographics is the classification of a person or an audience based on their behaviors, interests, and aspirations.
– Where they shop
– Shows they watch
– Personality traits
– Hobbies
– Sports teams they root for
– Career goals
– Etc
Inputting these classifications can narrow your audience pool and give you more control over who’s seeing what. It’s the digital equivalent of placing a billboard ad for your gym outside of a Weight Watchers clinic. And can you guess where that comes from? Strategy.
If you’re looking to drive serious conversions rather than impressions, utilizing psychographics is the way to go. A small, precise audience you know is looking for exactly what you’re selling will be much more effective than a broad pool of people who don’t care about your brand.
On the other end of targeting is the ability to exclude certain groups. And it’s not as harsh as it sounds. You’re not sitting at the lunch table saying, “You can’t sit with us.” you’re a business looking to make sure you’re not wasting your money.
If you’re running a daycare facility, you don’t need to be including 14-year-olds or 30-year-old single people with no children in your audience. It’s nothing personal; your product just doesn’t apply to their lifestyle right now.
It saves you money while also eliminating them from being bombarded with ads that mean nothing to them.
"Targeting is crucial because you want the right audience seeing your product or service. If you’re targeting/demographics is not set and too broad, it’s like throwing your money down the drain. You’re not reaching your targeted audience and your ad will suffer from poor engagement thus leading to zero conversions."
Deepu Thomas
Director of Marketing, INDIRAP
Now you’ve got your strategic targeted audience, and you understand who your campaign will be talking to. The next step is to craft creative that is built around that specific strategy and is catered to your targeted audiences.
The colors and images you use will be determined by those factors. The copy that is written will be crafted around the campaign goals while also successfully applying a tone that will capture your specific audience’s attention.
It’ll probably take many, many rounds of edits, but once you find something that works on every level, you’re ready to go live.
A/B split testing is how we run all of our paid ad campaigns here at INDIRAP. It’s the best way to test out your creative on your audience and see which version performs the best.
From there, you can hone in on the ads that are giving you the best results and put more money behind them to help them perform even better.
Running a successful campaign isn’t as simple as going live and then sitting back with your feet up as the money comes pouring in. Your job’s not done yet. You have to diligently watch your numbers every day.
How much are you paying per conversion, are you getting the results you wanted, do people seem interested? If you accept a failing campaign without putting any effort into adjusting it, you’re giving up halfway.
Watch the numbers and remember to be flexible if the numbers aren’t what you expected. Rework the system until they do.
INDIRAP is a full service video production, growth marketing and communications agency.
