Audience Targeting - What is it and how you should use it to increase ROI

So knowing your audience is one of the core components of Business 101. Making sure that your targeting isn't way off can make or save you a lot of advertising money. Also audience targeting is important if you want more people to convert on social media. So let's dive into it.

Who wants to buy your solution?

So think about the type of people who will want to buy your product. Every product or a service, solves a problem that their audience is facing. For eg, if you're selling lawnmowers, then you're providing a solution to the problem of maintaining your garden and trimming the grass. So what kind of people would have this problem? Again, people/institutions/businesses who want to take care of their garden and/or trim grass. That's your target audience.

And that brings us to my next point,

What is the personality of your audience?

Once, you know your target audience it's time to think about their personality. What do they do? where do they work? when are they online? when do they engage with online content? have they interacted with your social channels before? etc. It's important to know these things in order to optimize your ads. Serving the right kind of ads for the right kind of people will mean that you'll get more engagement and conversions. So better targeting = better ROAS. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is the amount of money you make back on your ad spending.

About Ads

Audience targeting is important but there is one thing you have to keep in mind. Highly targeted ads might get you more conversions, but they will also be expensive to run. Hence it's good to keep the highly targeted ads for the middle and the bottom of the sales funnel, while creating broad campaigns at the top of the funnel, at the awareness and interest stages. More on the social media funnel in another blog.

Okay so back to audience targeting. A good basic thing to do in order to know more about the personality of your audience is to talk to people. Talk to your friends, family, people who work with you and get their opinions. Conduct surveys on your social media channels. Create content that adds value and give it away for free to your followers. Then you can target the people who interact with that content, and show high quality tailored ads to them in order to get them to convert into your customers.

Locations

Another great way to narrow your audience is to target people who live in your city, town, state or country. This is specially beneficial to local businesses or to businesses with one or multiple outlets.

By showing your ads to people who fall into your selected geographical location, you increase your chances of getting more sales and conversions, as you'll attract people in and around your area of service. This is also great for creating a name for yourself in your neighborhood and getting your share of the local market. You can also target people who are in a specific radius around your business location.

Demographics

Another thing to consider with audience targeting are the demographics. Depending on your product or service, your audience will fall into specific age groups and genders. Some brands might cater to women and some to men. If you are into technology, the chances are that your audience will be younger on average. So use demographics to target the right audiences. Check your insights to know what age groups your followers fall into. Demographics should also be used to create graphical content for your ads, and then showing those ads to those specific people. Narrowing your audience based on demographics will help you in reaching the right people.

Interests

All human beings are different. And they have different interests. Your job is to find out which of these human beings would be interested in buying from you. To do that you can analyze competitor pages in Facebook, and what kind of people follow them and buy their products. You can also gather data about some of the other interests that these people have and then target them for your ads. If you're looking to sell products then it makes sense to sell to those people who have an interest in it.

Social listening can help you analyze people on social media and see what they're talking about. You can keep a tab on the conversations, not just concerning your brand, but your market in general. this will help you to tailor ads. So check out specific hashtags on twitter, instagram and facebook, and see what content you find. Figure out different interests and topics by monitoring conversations around your brand. In Google and Facebook, you can filter out your audience based on these interests.

Lookalikes, Custom Audiences and more

Lookalike audiences are audiences that are 'like' your specific set of audiences. For eg, if you post a video on Facebook, you can create a lookalike audience of the audience that viewed or interacted with your video. So Facebook shows your ads to a new set of audience that behaves like the set of audience that you defined (video views, page like, signups etc). Which means that these new people, who behave like the people that already like and engage with your content, are more likely to buy your products and services. Hence you have a chance of getting a higher conversion rate and CTR.

Or, you can create your own custom audiences based on collected data. It also helps if you install the Facebook pixel on your website so that it can collect traffic data. You can use this data to create a custom audience, for eg, people who spent the most time on your website, or people who signed up for your e-book, or a free webinar or people who bought something etc. You can use this data collected by the pixel and create custom audience sets. You can use these sets to show your ads to these people, and increase your chances of getting a higher ROI on your Facebook ad spending.

You can also upload your own customer lists and Facebook will find their profiles on their platform and show them your ads. You need to fill all the details in the customer list template accurately in order for this to work.

Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Twitter and Snapchat are huge platforms with tons of features that you can use to maximize your profits. Also, it's impossible to cover everything in one blog post. So I urge you guys to explore these platforms and check out all the features that they have to offer and see what benefits your business the most.

Abhishek Samant

Owner | Monochrome Social Media Works