The Importance of Audience Targeting in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy without insights into a business’ audience is going to struggle. But when you know who to target at the right time and through the right channels, you and your team will be able to connect your activity and campaigns to the business’ target audience far more effectively.

Below, we’ll break everything down for you, so you can get to grips with how to understand your audience and learn how to properly target your ideal audience with our strategy-enhancing insights.

The importance of audience targeting

Why is it important to understand your audience? Simply put, the more you know about who your targeting, the more you can target your content to their needs, the more service and support you can provide and the better your chances the business’ product or service can deal with their pain points.

In other words, it’ll help your content and brand connect on a deeper level, let stronger and more long-term relationships flourish and strengthen brand loyalty far into the future.

Understanding your audiences

Audience targeting begins with grouping your audience based on certain criteria, which can typically be broken down into the following types.

Demographics

This type of audience data looks at broad demographic information, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Occupation/income
• Education
• Geographic location

Interests

Or psychographics to give this data type its fancy name – looking at people’s shared interests, attitudes, lifestyles, and values can provide you with plenty of great information to create audience segments from.

Behaviours

You can also look to the way customers behave online to work out your target audience. Customer behaviour includes things like:

• Purchase history
• Email marketing open rates
• Website interactions
• Engagement with ads

Behaviours like the above can all help clue you into how to target your audience more effectively using the right channels.

How to understand your audience

There are loads of different ways you can start mining this information, too. We’ve collected some of the most effective methods for you below…

Data analysis

Any existing data you have could well be a good starting point. It’ll provide a certain level of insight, but more likely, it’ll show you the audience information you’re missing and should then go about obtaining. Analytical tools like HubSpot, GA4, and Facebook Insights will be essential here, giving you the software you need to view relevant audience info, so look into using these if you don’t already.

Surveys & market research

Surveys are a great way to get both broad and specific details from the people who use your products or services. Plus, by making them anonymous, it’s an excellent means of getting unfiltered, no-holds-barred responses that’ll provide you with detailed, honest insights they might have been afraid to tell you otherwise.

If you use HubSpot, then their customer feedback and survey software makes creating them, collecting results and then organising the data a breeze.

Feedback & engagement

Blog posts, social channels, customer service data, community forums and web forms are all a top source of audience feedback, so make sure you’re keeping an eye out on what they’re saying across them. From here you can work out what issues they’re having that you can work on resolving, and what are the things you can continue doing that your audience like.

Competitor analysis

Looking to what your competition is doing is important too. Carrying out competitor analysis lets you see what other businesses in your sector are up to, clueing you into information such as:

• What your competition are doing well
• What they aren’t doing so well
• The methods they’re using to target users
• What this audience is responding to
• What this audience isn’t responding to

This helps with identifying gaps in your own activity which you can though go about filling with unique content that appeals to the audience you share with your competition.

Audience targeting by channel

Channel-specific activity is an effective way to target audience through the places they can be most frequently found online. Optimise your respective strategies by using these top tips for reaching your target audience through the channels below…

Content & SEO

• Understand what your audience are searching for and why by using tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Aligning content with user needs is absolutely vital.
  
  
• Optimise the UX of your website. Not only does this boost conversion rates, but improving loading speed, mobile-readiness, readability and bounce rate can also affect search rankings too.
  
• Create content that’s relevant, authoritative and useful. Always keep your audience’s challenges and goals in mind, so you can tailor your content in ways that helps to deal with their issues.
  
• Your content should be optimised for conversions too, so include elements that get your audience to act, such as calls to action, lead forms and downloads.

Paid search

• Try to target broad audience groups first. After a while, you’ll be able to see what does and doesn’t work, so you can go about refining your ads and target more specific audience segments.

• Always analyse performance. Avoid just letting them run without carrying out any analysis once a campaign has ended – this’ll let you pursue the targeting that’s working so you can improve performance.

• Make use of assets and imagery to create more visually appealing ads, offers and discounts that speak to users at every stage of the funnel.

For some top tips on how to improve your Paid ad copy, head here.

Paid social

• Make sure you’re choosing the channels your target audience regularly use – and if they spend their time on multiple platforms, then make sure you invest in a paid social strategy that caters to the various channels they use.

• With 85% of mobile users active on social networks, it’s important to keep mobile in mind when creating your ads. Be mindful of copy length and make sure any images or videos can be easily viewed on smaller screens.
  
• Consider boosting your high-performing organic posts to further optimise target audience reach.

Organic social

• Schedule your posts to go live when you know your audience are going to be online.
  
• Leverage user-generated content that relates to your brand. Photos, videos, talking points and any other content posted by your audience is a proven way of appearing authentic and relatable – plus it costs you nothing.
  
• Be sure to engage with your audience’s posts and comments. Social media is all about being social, and the more you create a community with your followers, the more word-of-mouth will spread.

Email

• Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage all of your customer info in one place. This will also greatly help with segmenting your audience, which’ll come in handy when it’s time to create specific email campaigns.
  
• Don’t go for conversion straight off the bat. Warm up your targeted subscribers using informative content that shows off your brand’s benefits first. This is a great way to learn more about their motivations, which will be useful when you start to create more sales-y emails.
  
• Carry out A/B tests for better optimisation. Tinkering with subject lines, imagery and other aspects of your emails, and then sending them out to a small portion of your subscribers will let you know which variations get the best responses.

Analyse your business’ digital marketing maturity

The kinds of activity you’ll opt for will depend on how mature your digital marketing maturity is. Without the right level of maturity, your activity might falter rather than flourish.

So just how mature is your digital marketing right now? Take our quiz to find out what you need to do start boosting your commercial growth.

We hope you’ve found the above info helpful. But if you still need help discovering and targeting your business’ audience, then we’re here to help out. Head here to see how or give us a call on 0345 459 0558.