8 Tips for Finding your Best Target Audience in Advertising

Finding the best target audience in advertising and marketing campaigns is crucial for all business owners and marketing leaders.

After all, there’s little point in focusing on the particulars of a brand message for a product or service if you don’t know who you should be talking to. Why bother generating brand awareness with people who have no desire to buy what you’re selling?

So how do you find and reach your ideal target audience in advertising? To help you reach your targeted goals, just follow these eight tips and tricks.

1) Define your Ideal Target Audience from the Get-Go

In an ideal world, who would you like to reach? Start off with an idea of who you want to target, and then work to find that person.

Don’t be limited by personas either. Think more broadly than the typical segment.

Ideally, your advertising would reach and influence someone who will spend a lot of time using your service or spend money repeatedly on your product. What do these people look like? Everything you do should be for going after these people, the high LTV user or the big spender.

2) Where Can You Find Your Audience? Benefits of a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Once an ideal target audience has been identified, consider how they spend their time. What is the best medium to reach them?

Increasingly, the answer to this question is through mobile apps. Not only will Americans spend more time looking at their phones in 2019 than they will viewing television (226 minutes daily on mobile vs. 216 minutes for TV), but most of that mobile device time is devoted to apps. This year, adults in the U.S. will spend two hours and 14 minutes a day on average using apps, according to eMarketer.

Not only is mobile app usage on the rise, but advertising within mobile apps is hugely advantageous for brands and their advertising partners. Be sure to check out our blog post on the Top 8 Mobile App Advertising Benefits to learn more.

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Want to reach your target audience in 2019 and beyond? Chances are you’ll need a mobile marketing strategy to do that.

3) In a Mobile Marketing Campaign, Think Beyond Social Media

In the mobile app universe, it’s easy to focus just on the big players and the major social networks. But, there’s more to the in-app advertising space beyond just the obvious names.

On average, people use around nine apps a day and about 30 a month. So what kinds of apps are people using? Sure, they’re checking email and going on social media, but they’re also looking up the weather, reading the news, playing games, listening to music, trying to make their commute more bearable and doing a whole host of other activities - all within mobile apps.

Is your target audience likely using at least some of the world’s biggest and most popular apps? Sure, of course. Are they also using other apps every day? Likely.

4) Targeting a Specific Audience by Location

Journalism is all about answering the five W’s: who, what, where, when and why. Often, conversations about target audiences focus on the “who.” But, savvy marketers know that “where” is a crucial consideration as well.

Often, you can tell quite a lot about someone based on their location. Do they commute? Where do they go on weekends? Once you know the answers to these kinds of questions, you can offer regionally-specific deals, provide more customized offers and overall be in a better position to have more targeted and specific messaging and campaigns in place.

5) Develop Custom Messages by Persona

Once you develop a high-level idea of who your target audience is and where they’re located, you can begin developing key personas. How old are they? What do they like and dislike typically? How do they often make purchase decisions?

Make sure your campaign messaging is targeted by persona as well. While it’s possible that one targeted persona works for all of your potential audience, the chances of that being reality is slim. Instead, be as specific as possible for all of your persona segments, and then ensure each one of them gets messaging uniquely suited to their wants and needs.

Quick point on personas: When possible, avoid canned segments. While it can be tempting to just go with default personas, they’ll never be completely accurate for your unique target audience.

For example, let’s say you’re offered a canned segment of women in the U.S. between the ages of 35 and 49. While this may broadly fit a target demographic for your brand, there’s a lot of nuance you’d be missing out on by going so high level. Do they have children or not? Are they married, single or have a domestic partner? Are they a pet owner or not? Where specifically in the U.S. do they live or work? What is their income level, and is that income steady? Both personas and associated messaging should be as granular as is feasible.

6) Base Marketing Efforts Around Fresh Data Only

What do produce, fashion and audience targeting all have in common? They’re all about keeping it fresh.

When finding and addressing any audience, make sure your efforts are underpinned by the freshest data possible. Just because something was true a month or a week ago doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true today. By prioritizing fresh data, however, you will never worry about accuracy or timeliness.

So how do you ensure that you always have access to the freshest data? Use your own data when possible, and make sure any data-led partnerships you have in place prioritize freshness too.

“The move away from third party data standard segments will continue,” predicts Anne Frisbie, senior vice president of global programmatic and North America at InMobi. “Clients will increase their use of their own first party data, and leverage third party high quality data sources to create more custom audience segments to ensure that they are seeing the return on investment in terms of data.”

7) Identifying Your Target Market at Scale

Once you know who your target is, where they’re located, what they’re interested in and why and how they make purchase decisions, it’s time to run your campaigns. But make sure you’re reaching enough people to make your campaign worthwhile.

For most businesses, scale is just as important as precision. After all, if a campaign doesn’t reach many people, then the odds of enough purchases being made to justify initial ad spend are minimal.

8) Calculate Ideal Return on Investment

In addition to the five W’s, let’s add a sixth consideration: So what? What’s the point of reaching a specific target audience segment with advertising?

Once a campaign to a specific group of people has been run, take a look at key metrics to see how everything is performing. Is the initially identified audience seeing and interacting with the ad? Are they later making a purchase? Are specific audience segments performing better than others? Only by answering these ROI-focused questions can you accurately take stock of the effectiveness of your audience targeting initiatives.

Need help with audience targeting and messaging? Get in touch today to learn more about InMobi Audiences.

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