Super-focus your marketing plan with a 6-layer targeting strategy

Whether your organization’s objective is acquiring clients, growing your follower base, or increasing revenue from products and services, digital advertising and earned media play a crucial role in reaching your target audiences. And that means developing a messaging and marketing channel mix — building an effective engagement funnel for your audience segments — based on a multilayered targeting strategy that builds an effective engagement funnel for your desired audience. 

Start developing your high-performing marketing plan by figuring out how to reach that audience. This is a simplified version of your options: 

1. Demographic: Begin with basic targeting on demographic parameters such as age, gender, and geographic segmentation. 
2. Professional: Job title, seniority, industry, area of expertise, and other professional parameters are invaluable when it comes to identifying and estimating the size of new audiences — as well as reaching them with the right messaging. 
3. Affiliation: A good way to expand your audience both organically and through paid channels is by targeting people who fit your audience profile, based on their interaction with influencers, partners, related organizations, and competitors within the same subject field. 
4. Contextual: With contextual marketing, your targeting is based on the content your target audience is consuming and/or on placements in contextually relevant media. 
5. Behavioral: Targeting can also be triggered by online behavior; retargeting is a widely used example of this, with your target audience evolving dynamically based on their interaction with your online assets.
6. Interests: Targeting based on individuals’ specific interests is an obvious but efficient method as long as you’re able to differentiate yourself from your competitors. To that end, it’s important to build your content, channels, and engagement pathways based on topics that are of interest to your target audience; targeting can be also based on your audience’s own information needs via tools like search marketing campaigns. 

Using a targeting strategy to focus your marketing plan creates an efficient framework for managing your messaging, engagement funnel, and omnichannel campaigns. Starting from how rather than where help you align your objectives and deliver optimized messaging for each segment and channel. Ideally, your targeting strategy should incorporate all six of these elements; the correct mix will maximize your reach and yield the best results without wasting time or money on irrelevant tactics.