Everything You Didn’t Know About Targeted Advertising

Targeted advertising has become the holy grail for marketers and media buyers.

It is the process of getting the ad to the right person at the right time. Businesses are spending money to get their brand message across to more and more people. Reaching the right audience is the key to getting the best ROI. In this article, we will discuss targeted advertising.

What is Targeted Advertising?

Targeted advertising is the type of advertising that focuses on specific behaviour, traits, interests, or preferences of potential customers. It works by tracking the activity of customers on the internet.

The most important step of targeted advertising is knowing who your customers are, where and when you can find them, and understanding your customer’s demographics and behaviour. 

Advantages of Targeted Advertising

Targeted advertising is preferred by media buyers over other forms of advertising due to its following advantages:

Targeting the Right Audience 

Targeted advertising allows businesses to understand their potential customer’s needs and wants and create an advertising strategy targeting them. It connects you to your potential customers, who are more likely to buy your product or services based on their online behaviour and activity. 

Deliver a higher level of Personalization 

Ad personalization has become widely popular because of its effect on customer acquisition and retention, CTR (click-through rate), and CLV (customer lifetime value).

Ad targeting allows businesses to personalize Ads based on what they know about the customers and what customers need. The better the personalization, the better engagement, and ROI its results. Ad personalization can boost revenue by 15% and encourages repeat purchases.

Attracting high-quality leads

Targeting and personalizing ads for your specific audience leads to getting high-quality leads. You will reach out to the right audience to engage with your business and turn them into your potential customers. 

High ROI 

Publishing ads to relevant customers based on their behaviour, interest, and needs results in high conversion rates, sales, and revenue.

Targeting ads help you reduce the price per click as the ads are personalized and targetted only to customers that are interested in the brand and thus help get a better return on investments.

Lower cost

As compared to traditional and content marketing, targeted advertising costs are lower. It helps you customize your ads as per your budget and never lets you go over it. 

In-depth analytics

Advertising platforms that allow targeted advertising also gives excellent tools to show the real-time performance of your ads. They enable access to advanced analytics, which you can use to improve your ads and make timely changes to get better results.

Targeted Advertisement Statistics

All the advantages mentioned above of targeted advertisements are based on studies and research. Following are some facts that will give you more reasons behind the popularity of this type of advertisement:

• 41% of young internet users between the ages of 18-24 see targeted advertisements as an opportunity to discover new goods.
• 27% of internet users like targeted ads as an easy way to learn more about the products they are interested in.
• The average click-through rate of behavior-targeted ads is 5.3 times higher than other forms of advertisement.
• In 2018, contextual advertisement wanted the most popular, and 80% of European businesses preferred it over other types of targeted advertising.

Type of Targeting

Demographic Targeting

This type of targeting allows businesses to target audiences based on their age, gender, nationality, language, salary, etc.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual ad targeting helps ads get placed along with the related web content. While creating ads, media buyers can add related keywords, and that’s how the ad will show up on blogs, websites, etc., related to those keywords. This way, customers will have a better-integrated experience and are more likely to interact with your ad as it will be something they are interested in already.

Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural targeting is similar to contextual targeting as here. Also, ads are placed across the web. The placement of ads is based on users’ behaviour, browsing activity, links clicked, purchases, time spent on web pages, social media follows, etc.

Geographic Targeting

This type of targeting allows media buyers and brands to target their potential customers by location, region, or country. Geographic targeting is essential for businesses that operate in a specific location or want customers from an exact geographic location. 

Retargeting

Retargeting targets customers who have already shown interest in the brand and visited the website or social media profiles. 

Targeted Advertising vs Spray and Pray Form of Advertising

Spray and pray advertising is the oldest form of marketing and advertising. It works by sending advertisements or other forms of marketing communication to as many people as possible.

The interested audience will contact the business to buy a service or product. This is where it differs from targeted advertisement.

Another difference is that targeted advertisements allow advanced analytics, tracking conversions, and measuring campaign success, which is impossible with the spray and prays form of advertising.

Targeting vs Personalization

The following are three key differences between targeting and personalization:

Platforms For Targeted Advertising

Multiple social media platforms allow targeted advertising, and the following are popular ones:

#1. Targeted Advertising on Facebook

Facebook allows targeted advertising and is widely used by businesses for the same. Following are a few basic steps you need to follow to set up your first Facebook-targeted ad:

Create your account on Facebook ads manager; this is where you are going to create and manage all your Facebook ads.

Once your account is created, you will access the performance dashboard, where all your campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be listed. 

To create your ad, start by first choosing an objective for your campaign. You will have the following 11 different objectives to choose from:

• Brand awareness
• Reach
• Website Traffic
• Engagement
• App installs
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Messages
• Conversions
• Catalog sales
• Store traffic

The next step is defining your audience. You will have the option to choose targeting options from geographic location to a lookalike audience.

Then you need to create your ad with the option to add video, single image, carousel, or slideshow creatives.

The final step is to define your ad’s budget and time duration for which your ads will run.

#2. Targeted Advertising on Instagram

You can run targeted ads on Instagram through Facebook ads manager. It does not require additional steps other than selecting the Instagram option for where you want your ads to publish and connecting your Instagram account with the FB ads manager. It allows you to promote your existing Instagram posts and stories that did well or you want them to reach more audience. 

#3. Targeted Advertising on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media network for professionals, so it’s naturally targeting professional demographics. You can create a custom audience by uploading contact data or a lookalike audience. While building a lookalike audience, you can have the following options:

• Job title
• Company name
• Industry
• Interests- professional and personal

#4. Targeted Advertising on TikTok

TikTok being the most downloaded app on iOS in 2021, is the platform that mostly has a young audience. The platform allows you to target an audience based on the following options:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Language
• Interests and behaviour
• Device model, model, connection, and carrier

#5. Targeted Advertising on Twitter

With Twitter, you can target your audience using the following categories:

• Demographics: Age, Language, Location, Device, and Gender.
• Audience types: Events, Conversations, Keywords, Tweet Engagers, Movies & TV, Interests, and Lookalikes.
• Your audiences: using this category, you can distinguish between a custom audience and targeting your followers.

Targeted Advertising Tips

Targeted advertising is no doubt a great opportunity for your business to grow and scale to its full potential. It is the most cost-effective and efficient form of marketing and advertising. But according to many media buyers and marketers, the success of targeted ads lies behind the tricks and proven strategies and how a business implements them. Let’s discuss some tips you must implement:

• Retarget your customers: It is equally important to retain your loyal existing customer as much as it is to target new customers. Studies have shown that only 5-25% of new targeted customers will buy from you, but it is as high as 60-70% in the case of your existing customers.
• Show Ads to your fans: If you have existing followers on Facebook and Instagram, showing ads to them can boost your ROI by as much as 35 times.
• Split testing: It is always best to split-test your target audience. You need to find out which audience type within your targeted audience is converting more. Split testing can be based on gender, age, interests, device, etc.
• Lookalike audience: You can benefit from creating a lookalike audience with the same defining characteristics as your custom audience. Doing this will increase the number of your target prospects.

Conclusion

Data collection is an essential requirement for targeted advertising, sometimes raising privacy concerns. The future of targeted ads is very bright as long as they don’t go illegal tomorrow. This type of advertising is a win-win situation for both sides. Customers like getting advertisements for products or services only they are interested in, and businesses enjoy great results from them.

You can also explore some trigger marketing techniques for better targeting and ideas to engage users.