Audience Targeting Strategies For Omnichannel Advertisers

Ecommerce

Are you struggling to find and connect with the audience that would benefit from your products or services? Mastering audience targeting can transform your marketing efforts, enabling more impactful campaigns that drive conversions.

In this post, we’ll explain what audience targeting is and offer actionable strategies you can use to maximize campaign effectiveness. But we cover a lot of material — so feel free to use the jumplinks below to immediately skip to the section you’d like to read.

What Is Audience Targeting?

Audience targeting is a strategy that focuses marketing efforts on the consumers most likely to purchase your products or services. The goal is to identify key segments that show similar interests, purchasing behaviors, and needs. By leveraging these insights, you can deliver highly personalized and timely content, maximizing conversion rates.

Here’s why you need to target the right audience:

• It eliminates waste from your operations. Wasted dollars, wasted impressions, wasted time – all these inefficiencies stand in direct opposition to your company’s growth. Proper targeting ensures you reach the right customers when they’re ready to purchase, improving your overall return on ad spend and boosting the performance metrics of your campaigns, from higher click-through rates to better conversion rates.
• It can hyper-personalize your campaigns. Customers want to feel seen and known, and the right targeting can help you do just that. Backed by the right targeting data, your campaigns can appear custom-made for the audiences you wish to reach, increasing their likelihood to click, engage with, and purchase your products or services.
• It galvanizes your strategies with deep data: Audience targeting involves collecting, analyzing, and applying consumer data insights. This approach empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on actual behavior and trends. With a better understanding of consumers, they can focus on the most meaningful engagements.

We’ll explain how to target audiences in detail below, but here’s a brief rundown of how it works: First, brands build customer personas by gathering demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. Next, they activate campaigns targeting these segments. They then continuously test and refine campaigns using split testing and other key techniques.

Core Approaches to Audience Targeting

Understanding the primary approaches to audience targeting is crucial for any marketer aiming to deliver personalized and impactful campaigns. Let’s explore the key foundations of a strategy that can help you effectively connect with your ideal audience.

Demographics

Demographic audience targeting involves segmenting your audience based on factors like age, education level, gender, income, familial status, and occupation. However, it also includes geographic information, including where consumers live, go to school, shop, work, and more.

It’s often possible to achieve quantitative grouping since these attributes are intrinsic and usually observable. Once they’re known, it’s easier for you to create campaigns that speak to the specific needs of those groups. For example, a luxury fashion brand might target high-income consumers aged 30-50, while a children’s toy company could focus on parents aged 25-40.

Did you know that one of the earliest printed English advertisements was drafted in the 1400s, designed to sell a handbook for priests? To pique their interest, the flier mentioned that all information within was not only accurate but also one of the least expensive options on the market. The advertiser knew priests were on a fixed income and couldn’t spend lavishly, and used that information as a central selling point.

Psychographics

Psychographic audience targeting goes beyond basic demographic information to explore the lifestyles, values, interests, and attitudes of your audience. By understanding their motivations, you can more easily target the psychological factors that drive consumer behavior.

You might ask: What leisure activities do they engage in? What are they trying to accomplish in the short-term or long-term? What are their values and opinions? What lifestyle groups do they belong to?

Psychographics became mainstream much later than demographics, with the idea originally popularized in the US during World War I. It wasn’t until 1965 that the term was coined, and it experienced a massive surge in popularity during the 2000s and 2010s as digital marketing made it easier to target campaigns based on an individual’s exact interests and opinions.

Behavioral

Behavioral marketing is the newest form of audience targeting, emerging as the internet became inseparable from daily life. It can be something as simple as sending an abandoned cart email or as complex as studying someone’s wider online behavior to understand their immediate needs.

Behavioral targeting uses data that reflects a consumer’s immediate mindset and influences their likelihood to purchase. This includes the websites they visit, the content they engage with, past purchasing behaviors, and web searches they perform. Leveraging this data helps marketers make educated assumptions about a consumer’s thoughts and predict their next action, which moves them along the sales funnel.

Although marketers that use behavioral targeting have enjoyed much success, it’s no panacea. Ethical and legal dilemmas regarding data privacy have created barriers to collecting, storing, and using personal information.

For certain channels, like paid marketing, the throughline between behaviors and actions is increasingly difficult for marketers to determine without specialized marketing technology. However, email and SMS channels can offer integrated solutions to track on-site behavior if users opt in, highlighting the need for consent in marketing programs.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting involves placing ads on web pages or within content that’s directly relevant to the ad’s subject matter. Unlike behavioral targeting which focuses on a user’s past activities, it considers the context of the content they’re currently engaging with. Essentially, it ensures that ads are shown to users in environments that align with the ad’s message.

This approach is quickly growing in popularity since it has the benefits of behavioral marketing while also enhancing how relevant your marketing material is to the target consumer.

For example, If someone is reading a blog post about mountain biking, they may be interested in shopping at an outdoor recreation store. You could run a display ad on that blog. Or, if you own the blog, you could use on-site personalization to engage with this interest directly.

Some of these throughlines are simple, like the example above. Others can be more abstract based on how well you understand your audience. For instance, you might find that mountain bikers are also interested in local craft beer, and purchase ad space accordingly.

What’s the Role of Data in Audience Targeting?

Leveraging customer data is about precision. By combining insights from various data sources, you can build highly comprehensive customer profiles – ensuring your campaigns campaigns will hit their mark. The main types of data you’ll encounter are:

There are three types of data, all of which are collected and used in different ways. Together, the data forms a comprehensive customer profile, which you can use to more effectively target them and similar consumers.

• First-party data (1PD): Information your company owns and collects directly from your audience (e.g., website interactions, purchase history, email sign-ups).
• Second-party data (2PD): Essentially another company’s first-party data that you acquire through a partnership (e.g., a collaborator sharing their customer list).
• Third-party data (3PD): Data aggregated from various sources by companies that don’t have a direct relationship with the customers (e.g., data brokers).

Due to recent changes in privacy regulations, it’s become difficult to acquire and use third-party data – a headache for marketers given its power in helping to reach the right audience.

That said, there are sophisticated tools out there that match your brand’s first-party data with a rich ecosystem of consumer insights from firms like TransUnion or Experian. This additional layer of specificity unlocks extensive targeting capabilities to enhance and laser-focus your targeting.

If you have the technological means to unify these data sources, you can start making an impact. Here’s how we recommend marketers use their data for better audience targeting:

Suppress spend strategically

The key to reducing marketing waste is hidden in your first-party data. Brands can use purchase histories and CRM information to identify converted customers, then exclude them from new acquisition campaigns. This way, you avoid wasted ad spend and can allocate your budget towards attracting new prospects.

On the flip side, you should instead grow engagement among those converted customers. Once-loyal shoppers can be distracted by a new, shiny competitor, leading them to go dormant. To win them back, use second- and third-party data to understand the factors that led to disengagement. Then, use that information to understand their changing needs and craft more personalized messages that reignite interest.

Expand your audience

Detailed customer data (typically third-party data) can reveal new, high-potential audience segments that would be interested in your products or services – segmented by factors like income level, education, geographic location, and more. This can open your eyes to growth opportunities that might otherwise be missed, giving you the opportunity to strategically expand into valuable markets.

Or, instead of relying on vague assumptions, you can use your first-party data as the foundation for lookalike audiences. You can further refine these audiences by incorporating relevant second- or third-party data to identify and target new prospects who resemble your most profitable customers. We’ve found lookalike audiences to be a reliable fast track to better marketing ROI.

Build detailed segments

Segment-level tracking is exceptionally powerful, providing visibility into which campaigns and channels perform best with specific audiences. You can use your own first-party data to segment customers based on factors like demographics, purchase behavior, and lifetime value. From there, second party data can give you a detailed view into how your target customer behaves outside of your owned properties. Finally, third-party data can add more texture into your segments by exploring how certain audiences interact with the wider marketplace.

With these insights, campaigns can be monitored and fine-tuned to ensure you’re getting your message just right.

Identify untapped growth opportunities:

Detailed customer data (typically third-party data) can reveal new, high-potential audience segments that would be interested in your products or services – segmented by factors like income level, education, geographic location, and more. This can open your eyes to growth opportunities that might otherwise be missed, giving you the opportunity to strategically expand into valuable markets.

Data-Driven Strategies to Find and Reach Your Target Audience

Reaching your target audience effectively requires a well-defined strategy. In this section, we’ll provide some tried-and-true methods to help you identify, engage, and convert your ideal customers.

Set Clear Goals with KPIs

Effective audience targeting hinges on the ability to measure and evaluate the success of your campaigns. Start by establishing relevant KPIs for these benchmarks. Common KPIs to consider include click-through rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates. However, depending on your specific objectives, metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA) and customer lifetime value (CLV) may also help.

Once you’ve defined these metrics, collect baseline data that reflects your campaign performance prior to implementing or refining your audience-targeting strategy. These benchmarks will serve as a point of comparison to measure the success of your new initiatives.

For example, if one of your KPIs is click-through rate, assess what it was before you personalized your campaigns and compare it to the CTR after implementation. This will help you understand the direct impact of your strategies on user actions, helping you determine whether your new approach is effective.

As you implement targeting strategies across various channels, weigh their performance impact on broader business KPIs. Benchmarking can help by offering a comprehensive overview of campaign effectiveness on both a micro and macro level. Not all efforts will drive the same level of impact, and benchmarks will help you identify which strategies are worth continuing, tweaking, or discarding.

Consider the Funnel and Design Specific Campaigns

When designing campaigns for specific audience segments, it’s important to align your strategies with the stages of the customer journey: awareness, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

During the awareness stage, your goal is to build interest and make potential customers aware of your brand. You could target them using lookalike audience campaigns on social media. For instance, create a lookalike based on top-performing customers using your 1PD to identify customers who resemble your most valuable existing customers

In the pre-purchase stage, you need to persuade potential customers to buy your product or service. One way is by using display ads to retarget users who have visited specific product pages but haven’t converted. By retargeting them with ads showcasing the product they viewed along with features, reviews, or special offers, you can move them closer to making a decision.

The purchase stage is critical, and your campaigns at this point should focus on converting interest into sales. To entice customers, you could use personalized email campaigns based on purchase history. If one segment has a history of purchasing from the men’s category, have the main image show menswear with a CTA directing to shop for men’s items.

Post-purchase retention strategies turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. You may use a marketing strategy like location-based push notifications, informed by geolocation data, to send notifications to app users when they’re near a key location (like a cafe). When lapsed users are within a 2-mile radius, a special offer might be all it takes to bring them back.

In all of these steps, personalization also plays a key role. Using robust customer data, tailor your headlines, CTAs, and landing pages to reflect the interests of different segments. Keep in mind that personalization doesn’t always need to be a huge overhaul of your creative assets—it could be simple strategic adjustments like small changes to CTAs, headlines, and the number of categories you feature.

Tune into Your Target Audience

Nailing your target audience is the secret to digital advertising that actually works. When you know exactly who you’re talking to, your message lands better, your clicks cost less, and your ROI soars.

Here are a few ways to zero in on your ideal audience:

• Use Web Analytics: Tools like Google Analytics reveal the perfect cross-section of your brand’s target audience. With everything from who’s visiting your website and where they came from to what they clicked on, this data is the perfect way to discover the patterns that define your real (and potential) customers.
• Build Customer Personas: Take a deep dive into your existing customer base. What do they have in common? Use that intel to craft personas, with data-driven profiles and pain points that your product or service can solve. Again, this is where your 1PD and 3PD comes in handy; review for similar demographic and behavioral trends, and market to the overlap.
• Use Competitors for Inspiration: Track who’s engaging with your competition and listen to what they’re saying. This kind of reconnaissance will clue you into underserved needs and untapped segments that might be ripe for the taking.
• Mine Social Media Insights: Meta, TikTok, and X are powerful social platforms with equally powerful audience data. It’s a real-time way to see what content resonates, what falls flat, and who’s actually paying attention. It may take some digging, but it’s basically market research without paying for a focus group.
• Get Real with Customer Feedback: Solicit and use direct customer insights – surveys, customer service feedback, social posts, and more – to inform what your customers really think. Direct input from real customers gives you an unfiltered look into what they want, what’s missing, and what could turn them into superfans.

Bottom line: The better you know your audience, the smarter and more focused your campaigns can be. 

Target Search Audiences on Google

Google Ads provides an excellent way to pilot audience targeting strategies. Think about it: It has over 8.5 billion searches taking place every day and an extensive collection of user data, with advanced targeting capabilities to match.

Google buckets its users into segments based on age, income, location, gender, and more – similar to how your brand’s data is organized. You can then use these segments to sculpt your reach in your search, display advertising, or streaming video campaigns, and then monitor performance within each group to identify star performers. This also allows you to exclude any demographic segments that might not be worthwhile in your campaign, giving you full control over your budget.

As icing on the cake, Google’s ad campaigns produce near-real time results with limited spend required. So, you can see how a segment performs and provide corrections before you drop millions of dollars on a big TV spot.

Fine-Tune Your Retention Tactics

Once you understand your audience, you can bolster your strategies to ensure you don’t lose your customers to competitors. After all, it’s the age-old marketing adage: Retaining an existing customer is always cheaper than attracting a new one. 

At this stage, using the data at your disposal is essential to fine-tuning your retention efforts.

Customer demographics and purchase history offer a clear view into who your customers are and what they’re buying. With these in hand, you can deliver more targeted campaigns, identify buying patterns, and segment audiences based on relevant characteristics. The result is more personalized retention marketing that really feels customized to each segment you target.

Engagement data, like email open rates and social media interactions, helps gauge how customers are responding to your marketing. By analyzing this information, you can identify your most effective channels and messages, track changes in engagement over time, and make data-driven adjustments to improve retention strategies.

Finally, if your brand has a loyalty program (always a good idea for retention and building brand affinity), you can use that data to understand how customers are interacting with loyalty initiatives. This data can highlight which elements drive repeat behavior, while also revealing areas that may benefit from updates or additional incentives.

Test & Learn with Data

Great audience-targeting strategies are always evolving. While the fundamental structure of a persona may stay the same, the exact way of messaging them should change depending on the data. That’s why collecting data is so important.

Data collection lets you get a granular view of how different audience segments respond to various message tones, formats, and channels. Use that data to run split tests and see whether they respond more to your targeted campaigns or more of a general approach.

For instance, you can run two different versions of campaigns, one highly targeted and the other more general, then compare their performance. Monitor key metrics to see which yields the better results. Does the personalized email subject line result in higher open rates? Does a tailored landing page lead to more conversions? These small, controlled tests provide valuable information into whether your targeting initiatives are having an impact.

“A winning media strategy is one that works together. As you learn what’s working and where, continue testing and scaling across platforms. For example, if you’re finding that consumers are really loving and talking about product A on Reddit, start pushing paid dollars there, and pushing messaging about Product A into your Search, TVAD, and Social channels. This cross-sharing and pivoting will significantly elevate your media strategy and drive much greater ROI across the entire business.”

– Jack Johnson, Senior Innovation & Growth Director at Tinuiti

Study Outcomes & Repeat

Once your campaigns have reached a statistically significant audience, it’s time to assess their performance by comparing the results against the benchmarks you initially collected. Look at how different segments are engaging with your content. Are they clicking through? Are they converting?

For those in your audience group who are not taking positive actions, identify the potential reasons. Use this information to target them with a different campaign, or use a more generalized message to see if the lack of engagement is due to overly specific targeting.

Also consider whether the issue lies with the channels you’re using or targeting parameters, rather than with the campaign itself. If a particular segment isn’t interacting as expected, try using a different platform to reach them. Likewise, your audience criteria may need adjustment to better capture those who will engage.

If you find that your data is lacking or exists in too many siloes, Tinuiti can help revolutionize your targeting through data. With Bliss Point by Tinuiti’s Customer Insights Tool, you can view any and all combinations of your demographic metrics to finally know precisely who you’re talking to. 

Further, it provides regular data and reporting around your customer profiles, who your campaigns are reaching, and how much of a potential audience you’ve already captured (versus how much room you have to grow). 

Conclusion

Effective audience targeting requires a mix of strategies and data-driven optimization. By defining your audience, understanding the types of segmentation, and leveraging consumer data, you can create highly personalized campaigns that drive conversions.

We also cannot overstate just how important and impactful your data can be. Targeting based on all the data at your disposal can make the difference between a standout campaign and an unsuccessful one.

Ready to level up your approach to audience targeting? Learn how Tinuiti’s revolutionary Customer Insights Tool can help you reach your target audiences using industry-defining intelligence.