Whether you’re marketing a new business or an established enterprise company, you are always wondering, “Who is my target audience?”
This is true even if your product or service appeals to a wide-ranging demographic sampling.
Knowing the exact target of your marketing campaigns provides the foundation for successfully engaging with and persuading consumers to part ways with their cash to buy what you’re offering.
Naturally, it is tempting – and all too common – to dive straight into constructing a timetable of marketing initiatives and copy. However, it could all be for nothing if you neglect to first consider your target market.
Whether for targeting and segmenting, or just for messaging – you need to be informed.
In any case, an understanding of the audiences you resonate with is a modern requirement for digital marketers.
The Rise of Modern Technologies
Gaining an understanding of your audience is now substantially easier thanks to the explosion of innovative digital technologies.
New techniques and software continually push the boundaries of how brands can optimize their output.
For organizations across every industry, data is now accessible on a scale previously unseen and unimagined.
Teams of data scientists are employed today to provide business executives with valuable actionable insights. Together, they must act – at the risk of falling behind their competition.
It’s also true that the sources of this data tidal wave are more varied than ever before. Companies must be flexible as they search for ways to first capture and store such massive quantities of information.
Particularly if they intend to then surface opportunities from the noise and execute on the growth areas identified. This is key: making that data actionable.
A Problem of Data Management
While this wealth of data represents untold possibilities for every marketer, with it comes a challenge.
How do you uncover meaningful, relevant insights?
How can PPC marketing practitioners manage the deluge of online touchpoints that each customer creates with your brand in the digital environment?
Most importantly, how can one take that data and extract real, actionable decisions?
Fortunately for you, the question is not rhetorical.
The answer lies in an Audience Manager.
Traditionally in marketing terms, advertising focus has been placed on aspects such as campaign design, building keyword lists, and ad placement, among other things.
Meanwhile, audience targeting has often been cobbled together and established based on intuition.
In the saturated (to put it lightly) paid search marketplace of 2019, though, it’s of paramount importance that PPC campaigns are running at maximum efficiency.
That means assembling unique audience profiles so you can begin to uncover your most valuable target segments.
Marketers using tools that aggregate and process audience data are set up to do a few powerful things:
- Extract more revenue from customers that have demographic similarities.
- Find audience behaviors that lead to more conversions, and optimize those.
- Reduce or remove wasted spend on segments that perform poorly.
- Inform activities across your entire marketing program.
Integrating qualitative personas into your strategy will effectively empower you to:
- Reduce your cost per acquisition.
- Lift conversion rates.
- Increase customer lifetime value.
These are the things that really move the metaphorical needle in your favor.
Audience Segmentation to the Rescue
Marketers can build audience lists featuring their most highly-valued users.
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads are a powerful starting point.
A plethora of third-party solutions is becoming available as well.
Such platforms help to analyze the staggering quantities of data coming into your company through various channels. They can build dedicated audiences across each stage of the customer journey.
Most marketing organizations solely focus on higher funnel activities – namely brand awareness and interest – rather than the full buyer journey.
As such, by adopting an audience-driven approach, you’ll likely already be a step ahead.
Employing audience management functionalities will enable you to understand more about key patterns, actions, and behaviors that can influence how you connect with potential customers and remarket your product or service.
As an example, let’s pretend a specific user clicked a search ad, and then visited several pages of your website.
She is a 40- to 49-year-old female. She’s in the southwestern United States. She has certain interests and affinities, based on her searches.
On your site, she read a couple of case studies, watched a demo video, and finished by downloading a one-pager. It’s probably safe to assume she has a degree of interest in your offering.
By analyzing this data with an audience management tool, PPC practitioners can tease out insights into the socio-demographics of people who are searching for particular lines of content.
Based on the actions taken, they can determine where she falls in the buying journey.
An Audience Manager can then activate this data.
First, it will transform it into meaningful segments. Marketers can then deliver effective messaging that will resonate with similar users at exactly the right time. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Zooming-in on specific audience attributes and demographics can reveal substantial differences in performance.
This sort of savvy marketing investment ultimately allows you to extract the full potential from your campaigns.
Highlighting the True Value of Audience Manager
Audience management technology empowers marketers with the contextual perspectives of consumers.
- Who are they?
- What are their interests?
- What are they looking for at each stage along the funnel?
For companies operating in the digital space, it’s essential to be aware of the sheer number of experiences, users can have with their brand. It’s massive, and that means massive amounts of data.
The days of simple bucketing and analysis based on one dimension are long gone. In its place: an era in which audience members have very specific attributes, behaviors, and intentions.
Digital marketers must upgrade their practices to reflect this change in direction: create and deliver more personalized messages that resonate.
The world of search engine marketing is diverse and complex.
Maximizing efficiency through targeting options can be a daunting task.
Digital marketers fight to create, maintain, and adapt hundreds or thousands of campaigns.
Online advertising is overtaking the long-established media as the predominant source of investment.
Summary
Leveraging functionalities like an Audience Manager can unlock the power of data and give you exceptional control of where and to whom you are marketing.
The end result?
A seamless brand experience for users across a whole range of digital touchpoints. And a larger bottom line.
More Resources:
- 8 Dos & Don’ts of Search Audiences
- 5 Strategies for Customer Uploads in PPC Campaigns
- In-Market Audiences for Search: How & When to Use It
Image Credits
In-Post Images: iStockphoto.com
