Every year, businesses spend billions of dollars on social media advertising. From last few years, we are seeing a trend where big brands are spending more on social media advertising then TVCs. A primary reason for that is social media advertisements allows you to have a complete control over audience targeting which ensures us that an ad is seen by people most likely to convert.
“Marketing in general, was all about mass audience. Now, it’s much more about communication to niche targeted audiences.”
Although Social media marketing is a convenient way to advertise your product it is certainly not easy to advertise to the right audience. It takes a lot of thinking and research to find out the ideal audience and what strategies will work best to reach them. In this blog post, we will talk about how to use advanced ad targeting techniques on the major social networks to reach your target customers.
We have divided the whole process for targetting right audience in three simple steps.
- Creating Audience Persona
- Knowing the right target options and network
- Keep optimizing and increase ROI
We will discuss how to strategize and execute all the three steps.
Creating Audience Persona
Creating an Audience persona is the most important tool for gaining knowledge about the attributes of the people you’ll be advertising to. If you have already have detailed persona documents built out, but if not, creating these resources yourself will be well worth the effort. If not you need to create your own.
How to create audience persona
To create an audience persona you have to begin by picturing your ideal customer and brainstorm what challenges they face, what positions they may hold, and the ways in which they’ll interact with your company’s product or service.
Once you have the rough idea of your ideal audience then figure out the demographic information such as age and gender, as well as personal interests, and communication preferences, such as the types of devices they use. Other things you may include are education level, location, and income.
Now that you know what your customer persona is next thing is to consider what interests your target audience might have that intersect with the problem your product or service could solve. You can figure that by brainstorming lists of their likes and preferences, such as any similar brands that your persona may be interested in, popular authors in your industry they may follow online, or other relevant books and media. This information may seem irrelevant to you now but believe me, it will take you a long way toward making your targeting efforts more precise once you begin identifying targeting options on the social networks.
So, once we have figured out our customer persona. What they like or dislike and how can you solve their problem. We are ready to go to next step.
Knowing the right target options and network
Even though all your ad campaigns have a common goal but different social media platforms require different strategies to engage with your audience, for example, a LinkedIn user will likely be in a different mindset than someone scrolling through Instagram. We have to use these differences to our advantage while targeting.
Now the next question is what are the right network’s options for you. We have divided them into two main categories.
#1 Facebook and Instagram
Both are the product of Facebook and provides you the most available targeting options, and focus on all the data contained within a user’s personal profile, as well as the people and groups they interact with.
#2 Twitter and LinkedIn
Twitter and Linkedin are quite different in their approach to targeting users. Instead of focussing on user profile their targeting is based on keywords, user handles, hashtags, and conversations happening within the networks.
You have to create different strategies for different social networks and also need to figure out that on which network does your ideal audience use most. For Example, If you are looking to engage with senior business to business executives, LinkedIn is a good platform to use. On the other hand, if you would like to engage the young audience, Instagram or Facebook would be a better platform.
Keep Optimizing and Increase ROI
Once you have run an ad campaign on social media based on your targetted audience you can use data from past campaigns on your website to create remarketing and lookalike audiences, which help surface more individuals who are likely to convert in future campaigns. It is better to do remarket than creating the audience from the scratch everytime you start a campaign because remarketing and lookalike audiences generally have a higher likelihood of success, thanks to the data they’re based on.
To make sure you get good ROI on your campaign avoid putting your ad in front of people you know won’t convert. This is where excluding audiences comes in. Analyze your data from previous ad campaigns and exclude the audience that is not engaging with you or people who have already converted, by doing this exercise you’ll ensure you’re not spending your budget reaching people who have already converted, or who are existing employees.
Conclusion
So these are the three simple steps to target the right audience and where and how to find your audience. I hope this blog post will help you find the right audience and increase your ROI on social media advertising.
