Targeting Your Best Audience Before Your Ads Fail

Do you ever visit a webpage and cringe at the sight of an ad that just doesn't belong where it's at? Making no sense as to why it's in your line of sight in the first place, you scroll past its annoyance and never think about it further. This is not the scenario that you want to be in as a company, at first its alright but eventually, you should be aiming towards increasing conversions and leads

Targeting the correct audience and knowing who you are trying to reach for your advertising strategy can make a huge difference on which campaign that you choose and how much to spend. You have to start somewhere though so if you start off too broad that's ok, I will be giving you the low down in this post so that you can achieve your goals and reach the audience that is best for your business!

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Broad

Only in the beginning, keeping your audience too broad is a smart move in case you might have missed a segment or demographic when you were mapping out your advertising agenda. Unless you are a global corporate giant, you should probably aim to test out any advertising during the first trial very broadly so that you can pick out where you are receiving engagements (clicks, views, comments, likes, etc.). An awareness campaign does really well as a "trial run" using as broad and vast of an audience as possible.

Pros: Increases awareness giving you lots of impressions and reach on your statistical data. Its somewhat cheaper to run advertising campaigns through Facebook Ads and Pinterest Ads this way if you choose the "traffic" option. If you choose the awareness option you will be getting charged per so many impressions which just doesn't make sense to me, as this is just a trial run which also can push those ads on through to your Instagram followers as well if your business accounts are still linked. If you are using Facebook Business Manager then your Instagram account is either separate or you had to switch it back to a personal account, however, if you are using this as your FB advertising management tool of choice this is a perfect spot to use the split-level testing.

Cons: Doesn't do anything to increase your leads, conversion rates, or engagements drastically right away. This is definitely a step in the right direction though! If you are lucky you might hit it off right from the start and gain even more as you begin the narrowing phase.

Narrow

Once you have the results from scoping your broad audience out you can see the areas that are working and not working. For instance, the first time I ran a traffic campaign through FB Ads manager I was shocked as I received the most clicks opposite from my initial prediction! This isn't the time to change anything about the way you are creating your content just yet. Eventually narrowing will show you who to cater your content for but we aren't quite there yet.

Take the information from the "Broad" campaign and focus on the higher statistical values. For instance, if 90% of women versus 10% of men were reached then you would want to choose to narrow this campaign to only women since that value is significantly higher. To keep this from becoming too narrow, do not change the broadness of the location, or interests, however, set a parameter for recent purchases (available through Facebook Business Manager), and narrow down the age category eliminating your 2-3 least performing ages.

Pros: You should start to see fewer impressions and reach per engagement or click. An ideal value for these would be 50 impressions 20 clicks, but this isn't Hollywood so let's be realistic.

Cons: This is where the cost is going to increase to run an ad campaign that is more narrowed down. As a suggestion, I use an impressions campaign with your own intention to actually be increasing the opposite. Why? Because you want more clicks and engagements and fewer impressions at this point so you shouldn't be reaching the impressions limit they give you before they charge you.

Target

Drive more traffic to your online store using performance based marketing. You are starting to get closer to your niche market but the narrowing phase might take 3-4 trial runs spanning 3 days each trial with moving things around before you get to the targeting phase. After you narrow your audience down by making sure it's not too narrow then you can start creating ads that are going to increase your leads. Your leads may be different depending on what you are trying to accomplish these include: subscribing to your website, signing up for your newsletter, clicking further to go to a landing page or your blog. These are called "leads" because it gets your audience prepared to take an action further than the action that they are already completing. It puts you back into the driver's seat and better prepared for the next step. You will literally be leading the way.

Pros: Your traffic should be starting to explode at this point as well as your engagement score! If it hasn't yet left a comment at the end of this post and I will try to help you find a solution!

Cons: You aren't done yet so don't go doing anything drastic! You could lose that entire audience and have to start over if you aren't careful!

Refined Targeted Niche

Also known in advertising terms as the "sweet spot". When you start to gets leads and people taking serious action on your website or blog after advertising, narrowing, and targeting its an awesome feeling! Let shareasale.com find sales leads for you. Only pay when it works!

This goes without saying that from here you may need to run one more campaign over a span of a few days with a lead generation intent with even less volume and higher intent. Don't freak out just yet, read just a little bit further it's not as bad as it sounds!

When I did this the first time years ago during a consulting internship with 5 other team members, I never realized how difficult and time consuming this actually really is. We were given so much information that I took for granted. The client had given us down to the targeted spot and we had to refine it from there. Now that I've had to figure out this path on my own I can fully appreciate the benefits from it.

All you have to do is create one additional step that verifies that their information is correct on submission forms, add a captcha on your website or blog where you are leading them that verifies that they are not a bot, or have them verify that the email address that they provided is correct by sending them a verification auto-email before you let them gain entry further whether you are using a subscribe first then download offer or such.

This will give you a 40% clearer vision of your refined targeted niche. This may seem like a small percentage and that is ok at this point because it is a large enough statistical value that you could work with to make a profitable further advance onto the next level.

Pros: You might be confused and happy at the same time thinking that you are done.

Cons: There is still more work to be done!

The consulting internship I mentioned, resulted in 2 refined targeted niche outcomes that turned a small town company into a global powerhouse. I will be returning tomorrow to further elaborate as well as bring back pieces and parts from the Mixed Media Artist's Series' as to how this all ties back together.

By the way,  there are still a few days left for the 20% off sale going on for my original artworks on my website. Don't miss this chance!