Improving Campaign ROI with the Right Targeting Techniques

Targeting is a core component of the digital marketer’s daily responsibilities. Refining the techniques used to locate a specific audience online, presenting this audience with the right ads at the right time, and ultimately guiding them through the sales funnel to conversion requires persistence, creativity and a good measure of adaptability as conditions within the online marketplace evolve. 

There can be no optimal results in digital marketing without first fine-tuning your company’s targeting strategy. Allowing online campaign performance to guide your strategic decisions will transform a business from the ground-up if you let it, but first you have to know which tools are available to you and what makes them most effective.

Why Your Targeting Parameters Will Make or Break a Campaign

The genius of digital marketing is its ability to navigate around potentially uninterested or irrelevant audiences and instead deliver your brand’s advertising efforts only to those users with the highest chance of engaging with your business. Control over who sees your ads and the ability to measure a campaign’s performance in real-time to adjust a campaign’s parameters toward optimal performance are the key reasons digital ad-buying approached the $200 billion mark in 2021.

Depending on your business goals, targeting can either cast a wide net over a vast pool of online shoppers (these are often considered “awareness campaigns”) or pinpoint more qualified demographics through specific targeting levers like geography, age, gender, online behavior, past content viewed, industry, browser, device and more.

Good targeting techniques not only increase campaign efficiency and profitability — they also provide valuable insight into who your brand’s key audience demographics are, how they think and act when discovering your business for the first time, and what targeting levers are the most impactful at different stages of the sales funnel.

How You Can Benefit From Fine-Tuned Targeting

The days of blanketing airwaves with generic messaging hoping to catch the eye of your brand’s key demographics have largely passed. In the digital age, targeting and personalization are critical to marketing success — users want to see ads that are in some way relevant and helpful to them.

In the world of digital advertising, ad personalization has become a critical step in forging a positive relationship with customers. When you tailor your campaign parameters to the specific interests of your audience, each interaction between potential customers and your advertising messages increases the momentum toward your campaign’s final goal.

Data powers this customer journey, and first-party data specifically forms the basis of your most effective campaign efforts. As users engage with your ads, they present opportunities to learn more about their preferences and interests.

Targeting Methods You Should Add to Your Digital Toolbelt

Ever notice how once you add an item to a digital shopping cart, that same item seems to follow you via targeted advertisements for days and even weeks at a time? The process at work here is a powerful technique termed dynamic retargeting, designed to keep brands and products you’ve previously engaged with top-of-mind until you complete your purchase.

This is just one of many advantages offered by today’s online targeting techniques — here are some of the more common tools marketers should add to their repertoire:

Leveraging First-Party Data: An overwhelming amount of findings from a variety of sources agrees first-party data and personalized experiences are critical to success in the ecommerce space. Whether it’s analyzing which of your ads resonate best with your target age group or basing a campaign off of your own CRM list, a growing body of evidence suggests first-party data-based campaigns will only become more important over time.

Retargeting (Including Dynamic): No business will achieve an optimal online ROI without retargeting, or targeting those users who previously engaged with your content. Dynamic retargeting in particular can use detailed information on users’ individual interests to remind shoppers of products they viewed previously — or even better, products previously abandoned in a digital shipping cart just a click away from conversion. Using your product feed to dynamically target qualified would-be customers with updated inventory and pricing is a powerful low-funnel tool.

Contextual targeting: Did you know 67% of consumers have come to expect brands to automatically adjust their content based on their current context for a real-time personalized experience? Contextual targeting means delivering display or other ad types to websites directly relevant to the product being sold in the ad. Combined with first-party data, contextual targeting is positioned to take on even greater significance in the days ahead.

Segmentation: Major social platforms have universally enabled brands to build campaigns around past customer interactions, which in turn provides opportunity for brands to segment audiences based on a wide range of characteristics. The combined powers of dynamic retargeting and audience segmentation can deliver ads featuring products of interest to extremely qualified shoppers. Smart segmentation combined with the tools above across a variety of platforms will aid your business in better catering to individual users.