How to Reaches the Right Audience With Your Online Marketing Campaigns

Online marketing has become very popular due to its potential to create a lot of traffic and exposure. Still, not every marketing campaign manages to reach its desired results. Many businesses attempt to create in-house teams who deal with their digital marketing efforts. In a lot of cases, these efforts tend to be mediocre at best.

In order to create an effective marketing campaign, it is imperative to reach the right audience. The edge that digital marketing campaigns have over traditional marketing is contained in the possibility to choose who you target. This requires a bit of know-how to pull off and we are here to help you out with that.

Start from broad assumptions

Depending on the service and/or product you are trying to promote, you are going to have a general idea about the “ideal” audience you want to reach. The most basic segmentation is along these three defining factors:

-Location

-Age

-Gender

These should not be too difficult to identify. In some cases, not all three are really relevant but they are a good place to start. At this phase, the point is to make reliable assumptions about who would be interested in what the marketing campaign is pushing.

Let’s say you are doing a campaign for a hiking trip. Here, it is fair to assume that both genders would be interested in an offer like that. We would also assume that few teenagers would be interested and that senior citizens would also avoid it due to the fact that hiking can be quite demanding physically.

Next is the location – Here, things get a bit tricky since you can target people who are in the driving vicinity of your hiking trail or, if the trail is a bit more exclusive, you can broaden your approach.

Keep in mind that is a vague example. You need to pay special attention to detail.

Your competition

In order to hash out a more specific target audience, you can take a look at your competition. There are numerous ways to analyze their efforts. Take a look at their social media profiles, check out their website, subscribe to their newsletter, and so on.

Doing competitive research doesn’t mean that you need to copy their efforts to the letter. You can also use this information to build upon your previous audience or even identify some groups that your competitors have omitted. The point is to get a clearer bigger picture, to see if you might have missed something, and to create a better idea about who would be interested in what you have to offer.

Analytics

It is very important to keep in mind that your target audience is something you need to refine over time. At first, even through all of the research and planning, you will be painting in broad strokes. This is why it is important to gather and keep track of your analytics.

Gathering subscriptions and email information will help you put a face on the people that are responsive. By using analytics, you can see how effective (or ineffective) your campaign is. Analytics can even help you establish a snail mail campaign with more ease and with improved personalization.

By keeping track of your campaign, you will be getting more information which you can use to tinker and improve your future targeting. The longer you promote one brand, the clearer the target audience will become. Therefore, the effectiveness of your marketing campaign will improve.

The “right” target audience is a fluid thing, it’s not set in stone, and it will change over time, which is why it is imperative to rely on analytics to see when these shifts happen and compensate for them.

We hope we managed to give you a better idea of how targeting works. Good targeting is essential for any marketing success because otherwise, you might be wasting your buck on reaching people that have absolutely no interest in what you have to offer. The point of every marketing campaign is to create new leads with decent conversion rates. This is absolutely impossible to achieve without proper targeting. Good luck with your efforts!