Ads Targeting Guide for Beginners
The time when marketers tried to reach everyone has passed, and we are now in the era of targeted marketing. Targeting is the most powerful weapon in the hands of marketers, no matter how different the thing they are marketing for.
And targeting in advertising campaigns has become the only factor that can differentiate between good effective marketing and poor marketing.
Although targeting is a word that may seem confusing to many, I promise you, dear reader, that once you have finished this article, you will have the basics of the skill of targeting in advertising campaigns.
You will also be familiar with all aspects of the process from market segmentation, understanding the ideal buyer persona, to targeting methods and techniques.
What does targeting in Ads Targeting campaigns mean?
Targeting in advertising campaigns means that the e-marketer concentrates and intensifies all marketing efforts to the category that really cares about what it offers, and thus makes less effort to obtain marketing returns that are many times greater.
This is the matter in a nutshell, but that, as the Americans say, Just the tip of the iceberg (this is the tip of the iceberg), targeting is a delicate process that requires many steps that precede it in addition to several steps that follow, which determine the success of the advertising campaign from its failure.
And if you do not think that targeting in advertising campaigns is that important, then you should read these two studies:
1. According to Marketing Evolution, $37 billion is spent in vain marketing campaigns that are unable to target or interact with their target audience, and thus do not achieve the desired results or achieve no results at all.
2. According to an article on Marketing Week; About 47% of ad campaigns in the UK fail to target the right audience, so they also don't get the desired results.
Although targeting in advertising campaigns does not have a magic formula that proves its success every time, there are a number of questions that will help you find the audience that you will target.
These questions are the epitome of digital marketing genius Neil Patel, whose blog generates more than 20 million visitors every month thanks to an elaborate targeting process.
1. Who are your target audience?
Using market segmentation, you will focus on a number of categories that are likely to bring you the most profit, and since we are in the age of social media and Google, from the beginning you will have an idea of who is following and interested in what you offer.
The easiest way to do this is to follow the followers, likes, most important shares and comments on your content on various social media platforms, and by knowing these groups well and targeting them, you can motivate them to buy your products or services or even follow your content according to your marketing goal.
2. What are the main difficulties, problems and desires of this target audience?
Knowing the problems and difficulties faced by the target audience is your paved path to success and your plan to delight your customers and make them satisfied with your services.
3. Where does your target audience get their information from the Internet?
Everyone needs information. We are a generation that consumes content. Rather, according to scientists, a generation that is addicted to content, and there are thousands of information that our mind is exposed to every day that contribute to shaping our ways of thinking, and as an electronic marketer, you have to know what the sources of your target audience’s answer are.
This will make you able to read their minds and deliver your marketing message in their language that they understand well, which will make them very attracted to your products or services and buy them without thinking.
4. What real benefit do you offer to your target audience?
The majority of advertising campaigns fail to target the desired audience because they lack value, no matter how great your product or your services are, without extending the links between your product or services and the customer’s needs and problems, you will not get any reaction or interaction.
See things from their perspective, imagine that you need this product. What would make you buy it without dozens or hundreds of similar products?
What is the advantage that is available in it and not available in others? Does it have real value that you can understand? How will it affect your life and make it better and easier? What makes you trust him?
The benefit or value is your way to beat hundreds of competitors, which will automatically make you try to improve your product and provide more to beat the competitors.
5. What attracts your target audience negatively?
Thinking about the negatives will make you avoid many unwanted problems, it is a kind of learning without making mistakes.
If you answer this question efficiently, you will improve your marketing methods and the way you target your audience, which will avoid losing any customer or creating a negative image for them.
6. Who does your target audience trust?
Trust is the foundation on which everything is built, and this is what Amazon has realized well and made it focus on the reviews section of its products, the customer's trust in its sellers is unmatched by anything else.
You too, be like Amazon and try to build your target audience's trust the way you see fit, whether with offers, return and exchange guarantees, or customer testimonials.
Trust equals reputation, and in the world of marketing nothing is more important than reputation, and we often hear that there are people who simply put their name on a product that people buy without the slightest thought.
The Importance of Targeting in Ads Targeting Campaigns
1. Achieving your marketing goal: increasing sales, increasing traffic...etc.
Targeting in advertising campaigns is a powerful tool to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, which helps you to achieve your marketing goal easily, but also to reach levels that you never dreamed of.
For example, instead of your ads reaching 10,000 people of whom only 100 people bought your product, your ad reached only 1,000 people and 120 of them bought the product, so you spent much less on your campaign while generating more sales.
This is not only limited to sales, but any marketing objective that a business might need; From getting followers to getting information from them, because by targeting advertising campaigns, you can easily address interested customers who are ready to buy from you or communicate with you.
2. Rapid growth and access to a larger market share
Good marketing is half of the success, so targeting in advertising campaigns will make your project grow quickly, because the customer or consumer will finally find a company or product that they address and solve their problems.
If there is one thing marketers have learned from the Internet; Is that customers always love and respond to personalized content and advertising in an unprecedented way, so when you use targeting in ad campaigns - if your product is really good - you will grow faster than any competitor in the market.
3. Improve your product or service
Knowing your customers to this degree or putting yourself in their shoes “Putting yourself in their shoes” will make you able to improve your product or service to the form that most suits them, which will necessarily achieve the goals you seek.
By knowing your customers and putting yourself in their place, you will easily be able to become a distinctive mark in the market in which you compete, which will be reflected in the customer remembering you in the capacity he needs most; Whether it's quality, customer service, competitive price, or whatever quality he needs most.
This will essentially make your product or service a brand in itself, which is what any marketer desires. Being a brand in the minds of your customers will take you to another level in sales or customer loyalty to you and your product or service.
4. Reduce the expenses of the marketing process
The targeting process is essential for any marketer, because it will help him reduce the expenses of the marketing process to a minimum while maintaining the effectiveness of the marketing process, and even increasing it, and this is due to targeting only the customers who are interested in the product or service without the uninterested.
5. Talk directly to your customers
Targeting interested customers and understanding what is on their minds will make your marketing messages appear to answer the customer what is on his mind or address his problem directly, which will certainly affect his response to the marketing message and the advertising campaign as a whole.
This also comes to the point of personal messaging or personalized marketing, targeting will help you create a marketing message that addresses the customer - each customer - on an individual level.
Targeted advertising campaigns have a very important effect that some e-marketers neglect, which is determining the content that customers love and want, which is precisely what makes it easier for the marketer to work and contributes to achieving his marketing goals.
It also helps to create personalized content that the customer likes and influences, targeting will literally help you provide what your customers are looking for.
6. Reaching more potential customers
Targeting advertising campaigns will help your marketing message reach the largest possible number of people who are interested in your product, or who suffer from the problem that your product or service solves.
Instead of an advertising campaign that targets 10,000 people, of whom only 5,000 are interested… you can launch an ad campaign that targets 10,000 people who are interested in what you offer, thereby doubling the number of your potential customers and, consequently, your sales and profits.
7. Create a kind of loyalty to your customers
You may have seen queues of Apple fans camping in front of online stores months before the release of the new iPhone version and marveled. Well, do not be surprised, this is what is called in the art of marketing customer loyalty, and it is an important function for every marketer or marketing team in any company.
Creating customer loyalty is the long-term end result of any marketing goals, and fortunately, targeting in advertising campaigns greatly helps to achieve this goal by connecting the customer to the advantages provided by your product, service or even your content.
Ads targeting and market segmentation
We cannot talk about targeting a segment of customers before we segment or segment the market. Marketing segmentation is the process of passing all users in a market through several filters or filters based on different factors such as age, physical condition, level of education …..etc.
After this process is completed, the marketer will have a large number of customer segments who choose among them the appropriate for his business according to profitability and ability, as we will talk about.
A large number of marketers think that the STP (Segmentation, Targeting and Proposition) model is only suitable for large businesses or those that exist on the ground only, but in fact it is necessary for all types of businesses.
It cannot be dispensed with with regard to e-business, or that uses the means of communication, websites and e-mail as channels of communication with its customers.
For example, if you are an e-trainer, and you have a book on marketing that you want to sell; You do not have to make one book for all the different categories, including those who do not know anything about marketing, including the average skilled, and the professional.
It is better to first analyze and study your followers and the market, and then target a specific category, and to transfer the category of medium-skilled marketers who want to become professionals.
Then you target them with a book and set an appropriate price for the value of this book and market it to them, but if you decide to make one book for all of these categories, you will lose a lot because you will not be able to convince them all, and therefore you will lose many opportunities that were available to you.
Market segmentation
You can segment the market into 4 different aspects, namely:
1. Geographical aspect
Geographical division is appropriate for some types of business, and it includes dividing customers by postal number, city, country, urban environment, climate, or even in some large businesses according to the continent.
2. The demographic aspect
According to the demographic aspect, clients are divided according to several factors, including: age, gender, income, family status, education, number of family members, religion, ethnicity, orientation, and activities.
3. The psychological aspect
Some businesses concerned with consumers and consumption have the most important division according to the psychological characteristics of customers. They are divided according to personal traits, attitudes toward specific topics, interests, lifestyles, beliefs, priorities, and everything else within the scope of psychoanalysis.
4. Behavioral aspect
There are many companies and brands that prefer to play on the behavioral division of their customers, because it is the most suitable for what they offer, and the division from the behavioral side includes buying and spending habits, loyalty to the brand, etc., and large companies usually target their customers through behavioral traits.
Choose the right slide
The difficult task comes after conducting market research and market segmentation, which is to choose the right segment for you, which can achieve the most profits by targeting it, and marketing experts usually choose it according to five factors, namely:
1. Slide attraction
What is meant by the attractiveness of the segment here is the amount of expected profits that this segment will bring to you, and certainly the focus is on the segments that will achieve the highest profits, but this is not the only factor as we will see.
2. The capabilities and resources of the service provider
The segment may be very profitable, but we will not be able to provide the products with the number and presence required to win them and create loyalty to them, whether these are human or economic resources. Therefore, we must choose a category that is less profitable and more commensurate with the capabilities of the company, especially if you provide physical products and not services.
The shoe store owner and the Freelancer are equal here, but dealing with this factor is somewhat different. If you were the first, pressure would be a big problem, especially if you frustrated your customers many times.
But for a Free Lancer, he can easily dismiss new customers and focus on existing ones, and this is the point of contention over the nature of business and resources.
3. Homogeneity and excellence
Homogeneity and distinction here mean that this segment has similar or even close or common needs, in order to be able to target it with the same means and messages, and to be distinct, meaning that it is different from the rest of the other segments so that we can focus on them.
4. Competition
The marketer must keep in mind the competition in the market, although competition is a healthy and beneficial thing for business, but a lot of it is a danger sign that says do not approach, for this reason, if you find a segment crowded with competitors, you should move away a little and choose a segment that has fewer competitors.
The most appropriate story to express this factor is the story of anti-dandruff shampoo. At first, these products were aimed only at women, but then Head & Shoulders thought to target another very profitable segment, which is the segment of men, and to offer them an anti-dandruff shampoo for men, and so it was able to choose Highly profitable target segment.
5. Response
The fifth and final factor is the response related to the previous factors, and it is the most important of them because you have to choose a segment that will respond to your marketing messages. If your company cannot influence them and gain them, all the previous efforts will be in vain.
Market segmentation benefits
There is no doubt that the process of segmenting the market has many benefits, especially if you are going to rely on e-marketing.
Among the most important of these benefits:
- Determine the best methods and methods of marketing with your customers.
- Design successful marketing campaigns with high returns.
- Create irresistible marketing messages from customers.
- Distinguish your product among all the products and brands in the market.
- Create great loyalty in your customers.
- Discover opportunities in the market.
- Focus all your marketing efforts and thus achieve maximum success.
- Reduce risks.
Customer personality
Market segmentation is always associated with the so-called buyer persona, a concept intended to create a model for the intended or target customer. In meetings between marketers, fictional characters are mentioned.
For example, there is:
Mark:
The young man in his twenties who studies programming and follows foreign adventure films such as Marvel, and who is interested in the quality of the products we sell, whatever their price, and who is interested in the fact that the packaging of products is youthful, and the possibility of electronic shipment to his door, in addition to the presence of after-sales services.
Saly:
The forty mother who cares the most about the safety of her children and wants to be assured of the safety of those products on them, prefers that the products you buy are available in the hypermarket next to her house, and she also likes the availability of useful customer service.
Sarah:
The three-decade-old woman is preoccupied with how she looks and how much she pays for the service she receives. It is very important to have online reviews - especially from influencers - on the products she buys.
Of course, these examples are very superficial, but every successful marketer has to keep in mind a number of personalities that represent his customers or the class he is targeting.
Through these personalities, marketers discuss the updates, offers and developments that he will make on his products, and whether they will delight and satisfy his customers or not, how they will respond to them and whether they will accept them or not.
This method will make him interact more with his customers and understand them, but it also takes effort by developing these personalities periodically to adapt to the environment and its variables.
According to an Allison Banko case study; This method contributed to increasing the traffic of his site by 900%, in addition to raising the marketing returns by about 171%.
At the end of this point, I would like to clarify that the process of targeting market segments is not done through one segment only, but sometimes the marketer can choose a number of segments to work on, but it is preferable that these segments not be many, because this may distract your marketing messages and make the marketing process Your failure par excellence.
Targeting in digital marketing
To target in advertising campaigns has become an indispensable necessity in digital marketing, especially with the many tools that these platforms provide to facilitate targeting and make it more effective.
Below we will review some lessons specialized in targeting in some areas of e-marketing:
1. Targeting in different social media
All social media provide a number of tools in order to segment and target your audience, and this is increasing with time because the business model of these media is mainly based on advertising money, and therefore they try to provide the best advantages for e-marketers on it.
In the beginning, the e-marketer must study his audience well, and identify the characteristics that distinguish them. For example, the dominant age group, the most common gender, the interests, the pages they follow, and then do the same with his competitors to find out the best category to target.
Then comes the step of preparing the customer's personality, where the marketer determines a number of personal traits and characteristics that he would like to target, and then of course the targeting comes.
You will find many tools in every social media or even in others that require paid subscriptions, but we will talk here on Facebook in particular as an example of targeting in social media advertising campaigns.
Facebook has a very powerful targeting tool called Audience Insights, this tool is magical as it allows you to precisely target the audience you want starting from specifying age, location, language, job, social and emotional status and other demographic aspects.
In addition to demographic targeting, Facebook also allows you to target the audience by their interests, those interests related to your business; If you are a cafe owner, you can target your audience by focusing on food and drink, specifically cafes.
There is also more in-depth or more specialized targeting that allows you to target the audience by their job, the events they attend, education, the activities they do, and the like.
Facebook is one of the most used advertising platforms, due to the great capabilities that it can provide to you, and its ability to achieve your marketing goal, which you determine when you start preparing your advertising campaign.
2. Targeting in email marketing campaigns
Targeting in email marketing campaigns is very important, and not as many think that it is useless, the famous Mailchimp platform says that it contributes to opening 14% more emails and leads to 65% more clicks.
Of course, there are many ways to segment and target the audience of your marketing campaign, but in this article I will discuss with you only the three most important methods:
1. Demographic targeting
This is the easiest and simplest way to target, which is based on targeting your audience using the information you already have on their age, gender, and marital status.
By demographic targeting of your email campaigns you can do wonders, for example if you sell clothes and you target girls from 18 to 25 using your new guys kits you will generate absolutely amazing sales.
2. Geographical targeting
By defining the areas in which they live, you can effectively achieve your marketing goals. For example, you can market your raincoats to the residents of Alexandria at a time when it is notorious for storms and storms.
With this, you will achieve high sales compared to what would happen if you randomly target people from all governorates of Egypt.
3. Previous dealings with your customers
Recording your interactions with customers is very important, because it will enable you to send products similar to what they bought from you, and it will also help you to send products that they pay for, which they may buy through what they bought previously.
In addition to this, through the dates of purchase, you will be able to realize that some of your customers buy on certain occasions, so you can market some products to them in advance to encourage them to buy from you.
3. Targeting in Google Ads and Affiliate Marketing
Google search engine has very powerful tools in targeting your audience, which you can use either in marketing your products or in affiliate marketing.
You can target the audience by:
A/ keywords
Keyword targeting is the primary and primary targeting key that Google provides to advertisers, through which you can target the audience that searches on Google with certain words.
Of course, this can be customized more precisely by placing more targeting options, also in the case of advertising through partner sites with Google, targeting through the following other factors.
b/ demographic aspects
You can attract audiences to your products and services based on information such as: location, age, gender, and type of device they are using to browse.
C/ purchasing inclinations
As a product or service owner, you can target the audience who are looking for services or products similar to those you offer, and this will make them more likely to buy from you and hear about your product or service.
D/ similar audience
You can attract more buyers by targeting customers who have common interests with your existing customers and who are more likely to buy your products or services from you as well.
E/ Remarketing
You can re target the people who are interested in your ads, whether on the site or the application, which will make them see your ads more and therefore encourage your visit.
Conclusion
In simple points, I will conclude my topic today, which are as follows:
You can sell to anyone, but you can't target everyone.
Be creative in creating your marketing message. The more creative the ads your target audience sees, the more they will be attached and trusted.
Be careful not to set a clear goal for your marketing plan, as this way your marketing plan will not help you do anything.
Pay attention to the type of content you provide, as your target audience may prefer another form of non-traditional content used, such as finding virtual reality videos with them more than others.
Create different types of content targeting your customers at different stages of marketing.