As a business owner, you know the importance of marketing to get your brand out there. But did you know that targeting the wrong market can be worse than no advertising at all?
Sending out ads to the wrong market is a waste of your advertising budget. Your messages aren’t going to be received as well as they should, and you will lose out on the customers you could have gained.
Your marketing strategy needs to be focused on the ideal audience for your products or services. And it must be designed for maximum effectiveness.
Here, we’ll guide you through the key features of an effective marketing ad so you can optimize your next campaign.
1. Decide The Prime Locations
As much as we’d love to, it’s not possible to target your audience everywhere. While you’re building your business and expanding, look for the key places where your ideal market is most likely to be.
For example, an ideal client audience in the demographic of young parents will be where it’s kid-friendly. Your ads should be geared toward the cities and communities that include family-centric living. Favorite children’s TV shows, YouTube channels, and radio stations get the kids’ attention, and therefore, the parents’.
On the other hand, the same demographic audience likely won’t be in a city that markets senior citizens or singles.
2. Create An Ideal Client Avatar
Did you ever get an ad on social media that made you step back and wonder who was reading your mind? No, you’re not being eavesdropped on. The company simply has a really accurate method of targeting their market.
You can do the same thing once you know your target demographic.
Put yourself in a day in the life of your ideal client. Get to know everything about them, including what they do from the time they wake up until they go to bed.
Ask yourself questions like:
- What’s their age? Gender? Marital status?
- What kind of education do they have?
- Where do they work?
- Do they have children? What age?
- Do they have pets?
- What do they drive?
- What do they do all day?
When you break down your ideal customer this way, you get to know their pain points on a personal level. They have needs, and now that you can predict what they are, your product or service can solve them.
You, too, can be that business that reads minds.
3. Understand Their Interests
In a pool of one thousand potential customers, you’re going to get one thousand different, unique people. They’ll all have individual hobbies and interests, but when you analyze enough data, you’ll find common threads.
Which of those threads intersect with your business? Those are the areas you should target.
4. A Fictional Case Study
Let’s take Jodie, for example. She’s a fictitious single mom with three kids aged 3, 7, and 9. Her interests revolve around carpooling her children to their many activities and working, but she also loves to work out and eat healthy when she has time.
You can easily see that her pain point is a time crunch. Your product is an organic food service. If you target ads for healthy eating, you might not get her attention.
By showing her how your product will save her time and give her kids more nutrition, you’ve likely convinced her to buy.
5. Track Behaviors & Activity
On your own, you can’t track potential clients to see how they behave. With the right marketing software, though, the job is done for you.
What are the previous consumer behaviors of those in your target market? What are they most likely to buy, and when?
What kind of devices do they use? How can you create ads that show up on those devices at the optimal time?
You don’t have to invade your audience’s privacy. All of this information is available with big data collection services. When you know the typical consumer behavior of your target market, you can design and schedule ads effectively.
Conclusion
Advertising intelligently is a way to get the best return on your investment possible. It works; otherwise, mega-corporations like McDonald’s and Nike wouldn’t spend millions of dollars each year on marketing.
If you’re going to shell out the resources, you want to be sure you’re getting the most return on your dollar. For that to happen, you have to get to know your ideal market so you can target them effectively.
Before you design your next marketing campaign, use these tips to understand what makes up an optimized strategy. Then, let the data guide you as you create the perfect targeted ad.
