Ad Targeting: How To Reach The Right Customers

Let’s talk targeting. Nowadays, even a well thought-out marketing strategy loses its effectiveness without a targeting plan. User’s online activity is saturated with ads wherever they go, meaning ads need to be relevant and eye-catching for them. Precise targeting ensures your ads are only shown to potential customers most likely to engage with your product or service. 

There are many different kinds of targeting, read on to hear about the main methods that Eskimi can help you with. 

Consider this

A targeting strategy, like everything else, starts with defining your campaign goals. Are you looking for more purchases, traffic, or to increase brand awareness? Are you an ecommerce site, a physical location, or a specific service? Targeting allows for more personalised user experiences, you can focus your ads to users at different stages of the marketing funnel.

Defining your ad campaign’s goals is the first step to the ultimate targeting strategy. Integrating inventory management software into your targeting strategy is particularly beneficial for ecommerce sites, as it enables you to align your ad campaigns with real-time inventory levels

The best targeting goes hand-in-hand with a clearly defined audience. Your campaign goals will often line up with the kinds of people you want to reach. A big mistake to make is to assume absolutely everyone is worth serving your ads to. If you know the characteristics, interests, and behaviours of your ideal audience, data which is readily available to advertisers, you can maximise your conversion rates and increase brand awareness.

Demographic targeting 

This is the most widespread method and usually done unconsciously by adept brands. A clearly defined audience is crucial, and this means developing a demographic profile. Consider what your product achieves for your customers, what problems it solves. This will help you identify an age group, gender, educational background, marital status, and a host of other profiles. 

This is the first step to eliminating irrelevant impressions. For example, if your audience is unmarried women in their early 20s, cutting out ads served to married men in their late 50s would be beneficial for your budget. This targeting step is critical, but is best served when mixed with more targeting strategies. 

Audience targeting

This sounds similar to the previous section, but within the same demographic profile can be a complete range of interests and behaviours that you would do well to consider. This can be called psychographic or behavioural targeting. 

This kind of targeting is facilitated through a user’s digital patterns; browsing activities, purchasing history, ads they’ve engaged with, etc. This is extremely useful for brands looking to personalise their buyer’s experience. For example, a health lifestyle brand might prioritise advertising to people who search for healthy recipes or fitness tips. 

Knowing who your audience are is critical, but knowing their values, activities, and lifestyle choices allows you to combine targeting strategies and reach a narrow audience. At Eskimi, we have thousands of subcategories for you to narrow your audience. 

Location targeting

This is the newest, most precise targeting method out there, but also the broadest. Location can refer to the placement of your ads on a specific page, but also the physical locations your ads appear. Both are worth examining for a refined targeting experience. 

You may think the placement of your ad isn’t important as long as it’s getting out there. But consider all the different websites; if you’re selling organic baby food, you shouldn’t want your ad appearing on websites frequented by teenagers. It’s not just websites anymore either, there’s mobile ads, in-game ads, out-of-home ads, there are digital capabilities everywhere nowadays, and it’s important to work with a platform that provides all these options. 

The other side of this coin is physical location. This is similar to placements in theory, all about figuring out the most effective place to run your ads. If you’re a small local business, you won’t want to run ads nationwide, there will be too many irrelevant impressions. Map targeting can be far more granular, however.

Geotargeting tracks user location, and serves ads in specific areas. Say you are a new restaurant looking for increased footfall, using radius targeting would reach people when they are close to your business, like promoting a special offer. A brand could target competitors’ customers with ads appearing in the radius around their contender’s shop. You can even target specific postcodes. 

We have a full-service targeting suite at Eskimi, run programmatically to optimise your campaigns in real-time, with data collected from thousands of sources. 

Don’t forget about data

Targeting the right customers is more successful with granular data gathering. First-party data, what you gather yourself, is great for developing your audience, but the kinds of third-party data a DSP like ours can provide real-time insights to evolving customer needs. 

Of course, this is a colossal amount of data to organise alone, and going programmatic is the best option to manage your targeting. Eskimi’s in-house data management platform runs alongside our DSP to optimise and update your data. 

It’s important with targeting to never assume because you’ve figured out the perfect demographic, your strategy is foolproof. The testing aspect of a campaign shouldn’t be forgotten, you should prioritise analysing performance and adjusting for the future. This is much more achievable with programmatic running your campaigns; Eskimi provides a collection of useful metrics to tell you if you’ve hit your targeting sweet spot. 

Targeting with Eskimi

Targeting is just one aspect of a marketing campaign. Overlapping the targeting methods discussed here and creating a narrow scope is the most effective targeting strategy. This will save you money, time, and allow a deeper understanding of your customer base. 

You can only go so far with targeting. Ads nowadays have to be innovative and eye-catching. Rich media creatives are the way forward with this, and you need a platform that can do it all.

Eskimi is here to provide you with a full stack service of data management, access to all the top publishers, and a creative suite that will elevate your next campaign to new heights. Get started with us today and see tangible upgrades to your site traffic and a loyal, aware customer base.