You’ve come to the right place to better target your potential customers, utilize your marketing resources and time in the right places and for the right people, and avoid spending your advertising budget on non-converting individuals. Today, we will share with you the most crucial tips prepared, tested, and verified by our digital marketing experts.
What is mass targeting?
Mass targeting is a method of dividing consumers into segments based on their interests or demographic data. Marketing experts use mass targeting to create campaigns directly aligned with consumers’ lifestyles.
When segmenting your target audience, consider the type of audience you want to reach for a specific campaign or product, and focus on the demographic characteristics you need to target. Your first consideration may be to reach out to your existing customers, of course. However, keep in mind that your existing customers may not always align with the target audience you’re trying to reach for each campaign or product. Demographic information to consider includes age, average income, interests, location, and gender. Another valuable data point is psychographics, which shows the values and motivations influencing the consumer’s journey that can benefit your business.
How does mass targeting work?
When it comes to marketing and advertising campaigns, knowing who is engaging with your content at a particular moment is crucial to delivering a relevant ad. The way to achieve this is through tools that allow you to create customer profiles to understand who your customers are.
Once you have all the data, the next crucial step is ‘mass targeting.’ Mass targeting is about activation and involves taking specific segments of your target audience and acting accordingly. Below, we will take a closer look at these steps…
What is the process of achieving effective targeting?
Firstly, start with a group of customers. Use your data management platform or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to segment your audience. After running your relevant ads, you can assess how your ads or content are performing in the targeted audience segment, and whether they align with your metrics, KPIs, and business objectives.
Regardless of your KPIs, ask yourself the following question: Are the results leading to conversions, more time spent on the page, or page views? If you find that the model isn’t working as desired, you can further segment your content or target audience and try again. Afterward, consider how to use this insight to inform your next customer acquisition strategy.
Now that you have a bit more understanding of mass targeting, let’s take a look at a few tips to keep in mind.
Mass Targeting Tips
1. Utilize analytics to gain more insights about your target audience.
Did you know that Google Analytics has a section that allows you to discover the interests of visitors to your website? This section categorizes your users based on their interests. For example, it can tell you whether your audience consists of travel enthusiasts, food lovers, or music enthusiasts.
Of course, keeping the goal of your campaign in mind is equally important. If you are trying to increase brand awareness, you may want to create content that appeals to a broader range of interests and limit the number of hyper-targeted groups.
2. How do you create a target audience?
Target audiences consist of individual customers, and the more you know about your customers, the more specific you can be when creating target audiences. The best place to start is with customer profiles. You can work with a Data Management Platform (DMP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or Customer Data Platform (CDP) to manage these profiles. To enhance these profiles, you can incorporate customer journey data and other information such as purchase behaviors from your analytics solution. Additionally, to further refine customer profiles, you may acquire or trade second and third-party data through a marketplace.
However, each customer should have a unique identifier so that you can recognize them across devices and data sources; otherwise, they may appear as two or more different customers or visitors when, in reality, they are the same person.
3. Interact with focus groups to study them.
If you find yourself lost in the chaos of big data when it comes to targeting your audience’s interests and all your research seems to be in vain, it’s time to engage with your customers. One way to understand how to market to your target audience is by directly asking them. Reaching out to your target individuals, be it through an Instagram poll or a marketing email, will make your customers feel empowered.
4. Create valuable content that appeals to your target audience on social media.
Your content should be something your target audience can use. If you notice that your audience engages well with specific types of content, be sure to incorporate that into your content calendar.
For example, if you find that Instagram is where you have the most engagement, make this the primary focus of your marketing efforts. Additionally, posts about discounts, upcoming launches, and resharing positive reviews can be beneficial content for your target audience.
5. Conduct A/B testing for your targeting to ensure effectiveness.
A/B testing is a highly useful test that you should add to your arsenal of marketing techniques. It involves dividing your target audience into two groups, A and B, for an experiment; these individuals will participate in a test run of your content and provide valuable feedback that can assist you in refining your marketing content before officially publishing it.
For example, if you have variations of a tweet for your product launch and want to determine which tweet will perform better, you can create an A/B test to help you make a choice.
6. Publish an ad and experiment, but personalize it for various audiences.
One of the most effective ways to diversify your content is by publishing personalized ads. If you have a rather generic ad, consider how you can tweak it slightly for various audiences. This method is the easiest way to make your target audience feel individually targeted.
What are some challenges you may encounter when targeting?
· The most common challenge is targeting too broad of an audience. If your reach is very broad, such as targeting people aged 18-49, you can increase your reach by targeting a smaller user base that is more likely to convert.
· Another challenge is bombarding your target audience with too many ads. You should vary your ads based on the segment of your target audience. At this point, it’s important to look at data across all different touchpoints before, during, or after the purchase and find the right frequency for ads.
· You may lack the tools or resources needed to accurately understand and target your customer audiences. You should have a database that can consolidate data from various sources to create unified customer profiles.
· Lastly, it is crucial to always know where your customers are in the sales cycle and have customer data updated in real-time to enable accurate segmentation at any given moment. Since a customer may enter different categories at different times, you need to keep track of where your customers stand and what changes in their lives may impact your targeting strategy.
Creating customer profiles and audience segments can be quite time-consuming. Today, many companies still invest significant effort and budget in ‘acting in real-time’ to achieve the most accurate audience targeting.
Until our next article…👋
