Every Year, business spend billions of dollars advertising on social media. From last few years, we are seeing a trend where big brands are spending more on social media advertising than TV ads and news paper. A primary reason to advertise on social media is because it is a perfect place to advertise any business and it gives the advertiser complete control over audience targeting there by making it easier than ever to ensure an ad is seen by people most likely to convert.
“MARKETING IN GENERAL, WAS ALL ABOUT MASS AUDIENCE. NOW, IT’S MUCH MORE ABOUT COMMUNICATION TO NICHE TARGETED AUDIENCES.”
But with more control comes more thinking. Advertisers should be prepared to think harder about who the ideal audience is and what strategies will work best for reaching them.
The whole process for targeting right audience can be divided into 3 simple steps :
- Creating Audience Persona
- Knowing the right target options and network
- Keep optimizing and increase ROI
CREATING AUDIENCE PERSONA
Audience or customer personas are an important tool for gaining knowledge about the attributes of the people you’ll be advertising to. If we have already detailed persona documents built out, but if not, creating these resources yourself will be well worth the effort. If not you need to create your own.
To create an audience persona we have to begin by picturing our ideal customer and brainstorm challenges they face, what positions they may hold, and the ways in which they’ll interact with our company’s product or service. Expand persona document by adding specific data that will inform ad targeting. For example, We should be sure to include demographic information such as age and gender, as well as personal interests, and communication preferences such as the types of devices they use. Other things you may include are education level, location and income. Now that we’ve got a firm understanding of the customer persona we’ll be targeting, take the time to think creatively about other, less obvious attributes this group might possess. In particular, consider what interests our target audience might have that intersect with the problem our product or service could solve. We can take our customer persona farther by brainstorming lists of their likes and preferences, such as any similar brands that our persona may be interested in, popular authors in our industry they may follow online, or other relevant books and media. Information like this goes a long way toward making our targeting efforts more precise once you begin identifying targeting options on the social networks.
So, once we have figured out our customer persona. What they like or dislike and how can we solve their problem. We are ready to go to next step.
KNOWING THE RIGHT TARGET OPTIONS AND NETWORK
While our ad campaign is built around one goal, it’s important to note that we will need a unique targeting strategy for each network we advertise on, to suit the different purpose of each network. For example, a LinkedIn user reading an article about productivity will likely be in a different mindset than someone scrolling through Instagram. Use these differences as an advantage when targeting.
The right network’s option can be divided into two main categories :
FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM
Facebook and Instagram provide the most available targeting options, and focus on all the data contained within a user’s personal profile, as well as the people and groups they interact with.
TWITTER AND LINKEDIN
Twitter and LinkedIn, focus less on profile data, and instead provide opportunities for targeting based on keywords, user handles, hashtags, and conversations happening within the networks.
We have to create different strategies for different social networks and also need to figure out that on which network does our ideal audience use most. For Example, If we are looking to engage with senior business to business executives, LinkedIn is a good platform to use.If we would like to engage the young audience, Instagram or Facebook would be a better platform.
KEEP OPTIMIZING AND INCREASE ROI
Once we run an ad campaign on social media based on our targeted audience we can use data from past campaigns on our website to create re-marketing and lookalike audiences, which help surface more individuals who are likely to convert in future campaigns. It is better to do re-market than creating the audience from the scratch every time we start a campaign because re-marketing and lookalike audiences generally have a higher likelihood of success, thanks to the data they’re based on.
To make sure we get good ROI on our campaign we should avoid putting our ad in front of people we know who won’t convert. This is where excluding audiences comes in. We need to analyze our data from previous ad campaigns and exclude the audience that is not engaging with us or people who have already converted, by doing this exercise we can ensure we’re not spending our budget reaching people who have already converted, or who are existing employees.
CONCLUSION
These are the three simple steps to target the right audience and where and how to find out our audience.