Audience Targeting Strategies for Social Media Ads

Social media advertising is essential if you are looking to expand your reach to new target audiences—and fast.

Several studies show that organic reach is becoming harder to achieve. Going viral is a remote possibility for many marketers who can’t wait forever for the little boost it might give them.

However, it can be scary for businesses to move to social ads because there’s real money on the table, and want to make sure that they get the best ROI possible. The only way to ensure that is to understand all the options available to you.

Audience targeting is the main optimization tactic for most online marketers because it delivers bonafide results.

Let’s find out how you can source and use the audience data at your disposal to create compelling advertising strategies.

3 Ways To Find The Right Target Audience For Your Ads

You know pretty much everything there is to know about your close friends. That’s because you take the time to understand their interests and have shared values with them. Your relationship with your brand’s prospective customers and target buyers should be the same.

And that makes a strong case for marketing personalization; 88% of marketers agree that customers prefer to have a personalized experience with their brands. In comparison, 98% see a definite improvement in their customer relationships when they offer the same.

When creating custom audiences, brands need to invest in the creation of unique messaging for each audience. An audience segmented based on age will react differently to an audience created on a specific income bracket. In such a scenario, your messaging can be pivotal to your conversion rate.

Now that you know the why, let’s figure out how. Here are three powerful ways to find the perfect audiences for your ads and their related landing pages:

1. Psychographics

Psychographic data offers you a deeper understanding of the personality traits of your targets.

This is important because nearly two-thirds of global consumers prefer buying from brands with similar beliefs and values. Research these factors and inform your branding and advertising on how to build these into your messaging.

2. Demographics

Demographics inform you of the structure of the group you should be targeting. This includes information about their age, gender, job title, education and more.

3. Geographical Location

You can also choose to show your ads to audiences that reside in certain countries, cities or even smaller communities.

This way, you know that only the people who have access to your products and services get to see your ads, saving you advertising dollars and enhancing your ad campaigns’ effectiveness.

A combination of these targeting tactics can help you derive truly revolutionary audience targeting strategies.

2 Ways To Build Ads That Appeal To Your Target Audience

Now that you know your digital tribe and the kind of values they adhere to, it’s time to build ads that attract them and get them to act on your call-to-action (CTA).

Using the qualitative and quantitative insights from audience data, we can deploy these targeting techniques:

Leverage Facebook’s Advanced Retargeting Features

With close to 3 billion users, Facebook is the undisputed first-choice for social media marketing. However, its popularity as an advertiser’s favorite is also due to the advanced targeting features available on the platform.

By allowing ads to be targeted based on their likes, dislikes, preferences, and other personalization metrics, Facebook enables marketers to target their ads to the most relevant audience.

Contrastingly, users are exposed to only the most relevant advertisements that provide them more value and an incentive to convert.

Not only that, you can continue optimizing your advertisement campaigns by analyzing detailed insights into your campaign performance. By looking at cost-per-click, click-through-rates, and conversion rates—marketers can further tweak their campaigns to resonate more with their audience.

By allowing marketers to make highly informed decisions, Facebook has ensured its place as the primary social media marketing channel used by an overwhelming majority (87%) of marketers.

Gain Prominence With Google’s In-Market Audience

This is an underrated marketing feature offered by Google Ads, allowing businesses to pitch their marketing ads to people searching for similar offerings.

The in-market audience refers to people whose web crawling history, browsing behavior, and keyword activity dictate what products and services they’ve been interested in.

While these users may not have experienced a direct interaction with your business, their actions denote a high level of purchase intent. By curating a personalized ad around their pain points, you can easily convert such leads into paying customers.

Narrowing down on your best leads can give you a competitive edge. Studies report that people are four times more likely to click on a Google ad than on other search platforms such as Bing, Amazon, and YouTube.

Such informed decision-making not only lowers your customer acquisition costs but increases conversion efficiency.

What does it all mean for you?

Audience targeting has emerged as one of the critical concepts that propel social media marketing success. With the rise of personalized buying experiences, consumers also expect relevance and coherence from the targeted ads.

In fact, studies report that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that provide a customized experience.

With the help of advanced targeting platforms in place, you can make data-backed decisions that improve your ROI. The Sanctuary digital marketing team would be happy to help you nail down your target audiences and put together a plan for how to reach them. Talk to us today!