When spending money on any marketing or advertising initiative, it’s important to be sure you’re targeting the right people. Without the proper audience targeting, you could be wasting your money with little to no ROI.
SWOT Analysis
The first step to finding your desired target audience is to perform a SWOT analysis of your firm. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a device that forces a team to fully understand both the internal (Strengths and Weaknesses) and the external (Opportunities and Threats) aspects within their competitive environment. You need to understand your own firm and its positioning before you attempt to define your target audience.
Audience Insights
Once you fully understand your services/offerings and have explored the competitive landscape that surrounds them, you can begin aggregating your user data to find correlations and patterns within your data set. Most advertising platforms typically have an Audience Insights component to them. Often this component automatically extrapolates and organizes user data to make it simple to find audience patterns. Depending on the platform you’re advertising on, this data can provide new demographic and psychographic insights for your audience.
For example, if I am advertising for a local Beauty salon, the first insights I want to look at is the age and gender breakdown. If my audience is predominantly women over the age of 45, I probably want to adjust my audience targeting to exclude those below 25 or 30 if they are unlikely to convert. This is where ad optimization becomes a necessary tool.
Continually intaking data and optimizing your ad retargeting to reflect your actual targeted audience is becoming increasingly important. With more and more data available to advertisers, the ability to accurately know and understand your target audience is stronger than ever. To learn more about our creative strategy or stay up to date with the latest marketing trends and tips, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, The Creative.