How Do I Target the Optimal Digital Audience?

by Lauren Glover
  |  April 8, 2020  |  
April 8, 2020

A magnifying glass hones in on a target audience | optimal target audience
No one wants to waste money. Marketers really don’t want to waste money on ad spend for the wrong audience, people who just aren’t going to convert. That’s why targeting the optimal digital audience is essential. 

How Do I Target the Optimal Digital Audience?

Successful advertising means the ability to reach people who will be most interested in your product or service. With the sheer volume of competition in the ad world, attempting to serve effective ads to your ideal audience might feel overwhelming. That’s where targeting the right audience comes into play. If you want to get the right eyes on your marketing, you need to target the optimal digital audience, and that means audience segmentation.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

While it would be ideal to deliver a truly personalized message to each prospect, addressing their unique interests and needs, marketing teams just don’t have the technology and capacity to make that happen. Instead, marketing teams need to be able to deliver relevant messages at scale, through the use of audience segments. This targeted strategy can improve the customer experience, engagement, and campaign outcome, but only if you build quality audience segments.   

The first step to targeting your optimal digital audience is knowing who they are. What are their employment details? Know the size of their company, the industry, even the company culture. What are their specific job details? Here, you want to know details about their role within the company. What are their demographics? Consider things like their gender, age, salary, location, and education. What behavior have they demonstrated? You might look at their past purchasing or browsing history. What industry do they work in? What are their motives, challenges, values, fears, and needs? Audience segments start with information. The more information you can provide, the better you can narrow down your ideal target audience. Marketers can use the 1st party data they collect to target and segment audiences, as well as 3rd party data available from other websites.  

What does digital targeting mean?

Optimal digital audience targeting identifies a defined group of people who are considered to be a company’s or brand’s ideal customers. Marketers then create specific content aimed toward their particular needs and concerns.

Build Audience Segments Through Personas

Defining and building your optimal digital audience can be tricky, particularly for a B2B audience. One of the main obstacles for creating an effective B2B audience is that you aren’t always targeting an individual; you are frequently targeting a team. This obstacle is also precisely why you need to create audience segments based on different buyer personas.

Take all the information you gathered from learning about your target audience and use it to develop buyer personas, groups of buyers who share similarities. Buyer personas should share similar jobs and demographic information. Each of these buyer personas needs to share similar goals and challenges so you can create a targeted ad campaign to address these pain points. The better you define your buyer personas, the more likely you will be to create targeted marketing materials that will resonate with your audience. Additionally, these buyer personas should give you a strong understanding of where your customers spend their time online and which channels to use to reach them.

Reach Your Optimal Digital Audience

Targeting the optimal digital audience will require selecting the right audience and the right platform at the right time. Buyer personas help you not only understand the needs of your audience, but they help you target your audience so you can deliver different pieces of content to different personas. Remember that customers expect a cohesive experience wherever they interact with your brand, so keep things consistent within your audience segments as you share content across different channels.

Buyer personas aren’t set in stone and will need to be monitored and updated. Track your campaigns and make tweaks along the way to make sure you are best serving your audience and getting them the information that they need.

Vende Digital knows that while buyer personas are incredibly valuable for B2B marketers, they aren’t always easy to create. We can help. We’ll walk you through the steps to develop personas that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve your customers better.

Vende Digital is a B2B digital agency here to help you develop winning online solutions. Stop losing time, money, and customers; let us help you connect to your next customer. Schedule a complimentary digital marketing analysis to get started.

Key Takeaways

  • If you want to get the right eyes on your marketing, you need to target the optimal digital audience.
  • Optimal digital audience targeting identifies a defined group of people who are considered to be a company’s or brand’s ideal customers.
  • Marketing teams can deliver relevant messages at scale through the use of audience segments.
  • Targeting the optimal digital audience requires selecting the right audience and the right platform at the right time.
  • Buyer personas help you target your audience so you can deliver different pieces of content to different personas.
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