Everyone’s talking about hyper-personalized and highly-targeted marketing, but what do these terms really mean? It all comes down to target audience behavior and the tools and tactics to effectively reach your ideal audience.
Studies show that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver a personalized experience and that 76% of them get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. That means that not only marketers but also audiences are in on this new marketing trend.
So where to get started? First, you’ll need to understand who’s your target audience! The more accurate your audience is, the higher your conversion rate will be.
- What is a target audience?
- Types of target audience
- Target audience examples
- Cold vs. Warm audiences
- How to build a target audience
- Crafting an audience targeting strategy
- The benefits of audience-based marketing
- Automate your audience targeting: LeadsBridge integrations
- How to reach the ideal demographic audience
- Final takeaways
Thankfully, LeadsBridge’s Audience Targeting feature allows you to do just that. You can use it to integrate your CRM or email lists to ad targeting tools on your favorite platforms_ Facebook Custom Audiences, Google Customer Match, LinkedIn Matched Audiences, and TikTok Custom Audiences_ to automatically import your contacts’ lists and CRM segments and build more accurate audiences.
In this article, we’ll talk about what’s a target audience, how to create yours using different target audience examples and the best tools to use for targeting them.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is a group of people – defined by common traits, such as demographics and behaviors – who are likely to purchase your products or services. To effectively pass your marketing messages to your target audience, you need to know who they are, their desires, and their interests.
Define your target audience through behavioral and demographic features such as age, gender, income, education, or location. The target audience can also be a large market or a niche market. For example, for online math tutoring, you need clients who will be School students (K-12), College or university students, Parents of struggling students, Adult learners, Homeschooling families, and STEM students.
Types of target audience
There are many types of target audiences, according to what trait you’re interested in targeting. Target audience categories include:
- Cold audiences
- Warm audiences
- Customers
- Demographics
- Needs
- Attitudes & opinions
- Personality
- Lifestyles
- Fans
Remember, target audiences differ from one business to another.
Target audience examples
While there are several types and examples of custom audiences, you’ll also have to group them differently on each advertising platform. For instance, the audience structure on Facebook varies from those on Instagram or LinkedIn.
1. Cold audiences
“Cold audiences” refers to the people who have never heard of your business. However, they are searching for information relevant to your service or product on Google in order to solve a problem.
Reaching out to this group of people helps you offer them your solution and, with the right approach, even build a lasting business relationship with them for future sales. The most effective way to reach cold audiences is through ads on either Facebook or Google.
To create ads that will surely hit the target, you can cooperate with ad agencies or do it through your in-house demand generation team.
The objectives of targeting cold audiences are:
- Build brand awareness
- Create a lasting business relationship
- Encourage interested users to become leads and customers
- Track users’ journey on your website to learn more about them
Since cold audience leads hardly know about your business, targeting them is difficult. Collecting as much data as possible helps you build a relationship with them before you ask them to carry out any action (conversions).
2. Warm audiences
Warm audiences are people familiar with your business. They have visited your website at some point and are familiar with your products/ services.
Generally, warm audiences are:
- Your website visitors.
- People who interacted with your content.
- People on your email list.
- Subscribers on your app.
- Your in-store visit
However, these people have not, yet, shown interest in completing a purchase. So you’ll need to nurture and convert warm leads into customers – states the marketing experts of the Bookatrekking company specializing in the most popular trekking routes and trails all over the globe: Eagle Walk, Mont Blanc, and so on.
To target warm audiences, you’ll need to segment them into two groups. The first is the group of people who merely visited your website, and the second is the group who are leads (shown a stronger intent).
The best way to target your website visitors is through the Facebook Pixel; a code snippet of code you install on your website to help you track the activities of your website visitors and micro conversions.
Then, this data will be used to create high-performing campaigns based on these audience segments. For example, you can create a custom audience of people who have not been to your website in the last 90 days.
Targeting your website visitors with granular audience segments helps increase the number of leads and sales because the ads’ message is more relevant to them.
Although the pixel is a great tool, it has shortcomings. For example, Ad Tracking Prevention (ITP) systems, and browsers can phase out third-party data entirely.
The solution to these restrictions is using Facebook Conversions API. This tool is specifically designed to help businesses maintain data privacy while delivering personalized advertising experiences to customers and audiences without relying on browser-based tools like cookies.
Learn more about cookieless future in the advertising sphere.
You’ll also have to connect your internal databases with Facebook to facilitate the platform’s conversion tracking feature. That’s where LeadsBridge comes in.
Below are some of our most popular integrations with Facebook Conversions API.
Facebook Pixel & GDPR
The use of the Facebook pixel is protected under GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This is a European economic region law that states all businesses should protect the EU audience’s personal data and privacy for transactions that occur within the EU member states.
This means you’ll need to get the consent of website visitors before you can use, store, manage, or analyze their data_Hence, GDPR‘s direct effect on the use of Facebook Pixel.
Advertisers usually get the audiences’ consent by showing a message when the page loads for the first time or during the sign-up process for an offer or email.
To uphold these privacy laws across your databases, however, you’ll need to keep your system up-to-date at all times. LeadsBridge’s Audience Targeting tool can automatically sync your custom audiences to Facebook to retarget or exclude leads at every funnel stage. These integrations allow your advertising to remain DGPR and TCPA-compliant.
Learn more about consent-based marketing here.
Targeting people who are leads
Targeting your existing leads is easier than targeting cold audiences since they already know you and your product or service.
To create custom audiences from people on your email lists, or app subscribers, you’ll have to download their data from your CRM or autoresponder and upload it to Facebook.
This can be done manually, which is a lot of hassle and prone to errors, or you can do it automatically using LeadsBridge. Custom audience integrations let you streamline data imports from your email lists to Facebook and sync your audience lists in real time.
Additionally, whenever a lead subscribes or unsubscribes, LeadsBridge automatically updates the information on Facebook.
Here’s an example of targeting warm audiences from your website and leads on your CRM:
3. Customers
Customers are another third target audience example you can use for your business. While this group has already made a purchase, you should overlook them. Targeting and retargeting them again and again with similar offers, special promotions, product upgrades, and other tactics can turn them into repeat customers.
Using the customer target audience is to help you upsell similar products or services and improve your customer lifetime value.
How to target customer audience
Customer Lifetime Value audiences work by uploading a customer list with spending figures for each customer to Facebook. The algorithm then sends the data to look for a similar audience to your highest value customers. This data helps you to correctly target the highest value customers and get better results.
Check out this example of targeting the customer audience:
Facebook Customer Lifetime Value helps you:
- Know the net profit you can visualize from each customer’s lifetime relationship with your company.
- Generate quality leads with high scores for your business.
- Increase conversions by targeting new subscribers with high Customer Lifetime Value with Facebook ads.
- Know your high-value customer age groups and search for a similar audience you can target with Facebook ads_ for a better return on investment.
- Reach people who can be frequent buyers that will repeat purchases.
Leverage Facebook Lifetime Value by creating an automatic audience with lifetime value. This can be easily done by using LeadsBridge Audience Targeting, enabling you to automatically create an audience by syncing Facebook with your CRM. In addition to a streamlined workflow, this data bridge helps track the value of the customers on your list.
4. Target demographic examples
Demographics describe a person or a group of people, such as age, gender, income, location, marital status, nationality, occupation, and education. Accordingly, demographic targeting is essential in creating hyper-personalized advertising campaigns and targeting the right audience.
Using demographics, you can focus your ads on the people most likely to make a purchase, avoid ineffective impressions, and hence, maximize your ROI. For instance, promoting baby food to teenagers will be a waste of your marketing dollars.
Cold vs. Warm audiences
Here’s a little recap of what cold vs. warm audiences are:
- A “cold audience” is everyone who is not aware of your business and never interacted with your business.
- A “warm audience” is everyone who is – to some extent – aware of your business. These people may be email subscribers, website visitors, Threads followers (the new social media platform) or subscribers on any of your social media platforms, etc.
How to build a target audience
You probably already have an idea of who your target audience should be. However, knowing exactly how to build a target audience is an entirely different story. Creating a granulated audience list calls for a strategy and the right tools; the outcome should be a final document describing your target audience as if it were real.
Having a well-defined, comprehensive target audience profile will help you better understand who your customers are, what they are looking for, their fears, their wants and needs, and of course, how you can respond to those needs.
Here is how to build a target audience from scratch.
Create in-depth descriptions of your ideal customers
Before you start looking at demographics, focus on what is most important to your customers and why they want to get involved with your business.
Understanding your customers’ perspective about the selling points – as well as the pain points – of your product or service, will help you understand what is the best approach to do business with them.
Customer reviews and surveys are especially helpful, along with any other existing data or analytics about your current customers.
Look into your potential customers’ demographics
Now that you have outlined the wants and needs of your potential customers, you can start looking into their personal info to develop more details. This data also gives you an idea about the best ways to create a targeting campaign.
Meet potential customers where they’re hanging
It doesn’t matter how great your products are, if your customers can’t find them and don’t know they exist you will never make it.
In order to build awareness, you’ll have to find out where they spend their time online and understand what kind of content appeals to them the most. Ultimately, reach out to your potential customers in environments they’re already familiar and comfortable with. This will increase your chances of finding the right people and grabbing their attention.
Crafting an audience targeting strategy
Now that you know what custom audiences are, it’s time to focus on an audience targeting strategy that brings in the results.
1. Expand your reach with Google’s in-market audiences
Google’s in-market audiences is an audience strategy that lets you target consumers who are researching your products or services.
Google Analytics assists you in finding the highest-performing affinity categories and in-market segments. Then, use this data to build different ad groups for each of your audiences.
This audience targeting strategy revolves around creating advertising decisions based on accurate and analytical data. By learning who your best customers are, you can go out and find more of them.
2. Remarket with Google Ads
It’s much easier to retain a customer than to acquire a new one, which is why remarketing campaigns are such an effective audience strategy.
With Google Ads, you can build & target audiences of people who have previously interacted with your business, or shown interest in your product or service. Once you have collected this data, run A/B tests with different ad clusters to compare which one of your campaigns are the most effective.
3. Retarget with Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook offers the biggest and widest selection of formats to target, reach, and engage potential customers_ which is perfect for creating highly-personalized campaigns.
Using Facebook Custom Audiences allows you to target users on the platform based on their interests, showing them only relevant ads. To succeed with this strategy however, you’ll need to create an interconnected marketing system.
4. Use LinkedIn for keyword research
Here’s an audience targeting strategy that might seem a bit odd but has actually proved to be extremely effective: translating job title targeting to keyword research.
This means going through the profiles of different professionals with job titles that you want to target on LinkedIn and scraping the content on their LinkedIn profiles to come up with keyword lists. These keywords can be used as a source for making your search campaigns and audiences much more targeted.
The benefits of audience-based marketing
Running audience-based marketing campaigns comes with many advantages. Let’s have a look at some of them below.
Identify true potential customers
When you focus your targeting efforts on a specific group of users that you know will most likely be interested in your brand and product. So you’re automatically driving more quality, in target traffic, which will most likely turn into paying customers.
Share valuable content
When running audience-based marketing campaigns, you know exactly who will see these ads. For this reason, it becomes extremely easy to create relatable content for your potential customers. It’s crucial to ensure inclusivity in content creation to enhance diversity and connect with your audience effectively.
Increase conversion rates
Keeping your audience-based marketing campaigns fully focused on benefitting the target audience boosts your ROIs.
Automate your audience targeting: LeadsBridge integrations
As official partners with the top advertising platforms– Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok– LeadsBridge helps you create an integrated marketing ecosystem and build highly-targeted audience lists.
With just a few clicks, you can build integrations that automatically syncs your CRM segments, email marketing contacts, or customer lists with your favorite advertising platform. In addition to keeping your advertising GRDP compliant, these data bridges help exclude customers and even combine multiple data sources to build one single custom audience.
Watch this short video to learn how LeadsBridge Audience Targeting tool actually works: https://youtu.be/ekqGzJK35XU .
Audience Add-on
In today’s digital sphere, Custom Audience segments are paramount to marketing strategies and campaigns. Using LeadsBridge’s audience integrations, you can sync your existing audience segments in your marketing apps to any of the top advertising platforms.
These data bridges offer many advantages. However, most advertisers struggle with the issue of audience size-price ratio. As your business grows, you’ll need to target a higher number of audiences, and that means needing to invest more of your marketing budget.
So to help you better plan and track your marketing budget, LeadsBridge has introduced the audience add-on. Our audience size pricing enables our clients to engage and advertise to more leads affordably. In short, you pay only for what you use.
To activate the audience counter on your current plan, all you have to do is get in touch with our sales team: Book a call today.
Target audience across different advertising platforms
When it comes to target audiences in advertising, each platform has its own tool to build custom audiences.
Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook provides the best tool for targeting cold, warm, or hot audiences.
Facebook Lookalike Audience is a feature on Facebook that makes it easy for you to target cold audiences who have similar characteristics to your leads and customers. This helps reach people with similar interests and demographics to your ideal customers, which makes it easy for you to get more clients.
Lookalike Audiences are created by uploading the source audience (i.e. customers list, website visitors, Facebook page fans, etc.) into Facebook. When you click on create a lookalike audience tab in the Ads Manager, Facebook helps you find a similar audience with the same demographics and interests as the source audience.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences lets you:
- Enhance the results of your campaigns by showing your ads to users who have similar characteristics to your existing audience.
- Control the percentage of the affinity of your audience. You may choose how similar your new audience will be to the original audience.
- Know the ads with the best affinity options, helping you track user reactions.
- Optimize return on investment.
Here’s the complete guide to marketing ROI and How to calculate it and it to your business.
Below is an example of a Facebook ad targeting cold audiences.
You can use Facebook to target warm and SQL contacts by creating custom audiences from your existing lead and customer data. Here are some of our most popular integrations for Facebook Custom Audiences.
Instagram target audience
To target the right target audience on Instagram, you’ll need to have a knowledge of who you are targeting and how to approach them. Building a strategy approach for your Instagram target audience also helps intrigue your followers, produce the right content to engage them, and reach them at the right time.
Use your business’s defined buyer persona to define your Instagram target audience. Then develop it further by looking into your competitors’ Instagram audience and the existing demographic insights from your Instagram analytics.
By integrating your audience segments with Instagram through LeadsBridges’ integrations for Instagram Custom Audiences, you can seamlessly target cold, warm, or hot audiences, create lookalike audiences, create hyper-personalized ads, and more.
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LinkedIn Matched Audiences
LinkedIn Matched Audiences also lets you target cold audiences who are in specific marketing industries.
The LinkedIn’ Matched Audiences tool helps advertisers target people who are most likely to become qualified leads. It boosts your marketing efforts through account-based targeting and building a customized audience of prospects you can target.
With LeadsBridge, you can integrate LinkedIn Matched Audiences with your favorite marketing tool. This will help you funnel your leads straight to your system as soon as they come in.
Below is a perfect example of Stripe targeting cold audiences with a step-by-step PCI compliance guide in exchange for lead information, such as name and email.
What’s more, Matched Audiences let you retarget website visitors, reach contacts, and leverage your business and LinkedIn’s professional data. Here is a list of some of our most popular integrations for LinkedIn Matched Audiences.
LinkedIn Matched Audiences is a great tool for targeting people on your email list. You can promote your product and service to contacts on your CRM database and marketing automation platforms. All you need to do is upload your email lists or connect to your contact management platform and use it to create a relevant campaign for warm audiences.
In addition to targeting an accurate audience, this feature helps you deliver relevant content and drive more conversions.
Google Customer Match
Google Customer Match is a tool created by Google Ads to help advertisers build highly-targeted PPC Ads on Google products_Gmail, Search network, Display network, and YouTube_using the prospects’ email addresses, phone, or physical address.
With Google Customer Match you can:
- Move prospects down the sales funnel
- Convert mid and low funnel prospects
- Sell more to your existing customers
- Target users across different devices
Upload the file containing your email lists into Google Ads, then create a campaign to target your customers. To make your data imports easy and error-free, automate the process by integrating Google Customer Match with your CRM.
[If you’d like to learn more about Google Customer Match, you can watch the recording of our webinar with Google.] banner replacement
TikTok Custom Audiences
TikTok Custom Audiences is a tool available on TikTok Business Manager, allowing you to find and target the people on the platform who already know or have engaged with your business.
This kind of advertising helps:
- reach loyal customers
- Increase brand awareness and your TikTok followers
- Transfer app engagement to other platforms
- Create lookalike audiences
First, upload your own list of customers – whether it’s an email list, through a Pixel on your website, or by targeting people who have interacted with your previous posts and ads – and then create ads that are specifically designed for that audience.
Then, integrate TikTok Custom Audiences with your favorite marketing apps via LeadsBridge for an automated, real-time lead data management. Building a seamless connection between TikTok Custom Audiences and your marketing stack allows you to create an accurate audience who expressed consent to be targeted by your ads. Opted-out leads are automatically excluded.
Learn everything there’s to know about TikTok Custom Audiences here.
If you’d like to integrate your marketing tools with TikTok Custom Audiences, join our waiting list.
How to reach the ideal demographic audience
1. Create a buyer persona
A buyer persona is an avatar that portrays your ideal customer, along with their challenges and goals. Creating this image ensures that your marketing activities are tailored to answer your ideal customers’ needs and interests.
It also enables your sales and customer support teams to understand and serve customers better. To create a buyer persona, you’ll need to know personal details about your customers such as their age, location, interest, values, employment status, etc.
2. Remarket your audience
Remarketing ads help reach out to your target demographic audience and encourage them to interact with your business. It broadens your reach, increases your ROI, and keeps your brand in the thoughts of your users.
There are three ways you can remarket your audience: Google remarketing, Facebook remarketing, and CRM retargeting. Below you can find some useful guides about remarketing:
- Check out these retargeting ad examples
- Google ads remarketing tutorial: How to set it up and make it work
- The best strategies for Facebook retargeting ads in 2022
3. Automation
Automation helps you increase productivity, generate more revenue, improve customer retention and track and measure your efforts, so you know what’s working and what’s not. There are different things you can automate in your business, such as:
- Sync leads with your CRM
- Schedule social media posts
- Nurture leads through an email campaign workflow
- Personalize communication with customers
- Onboard new customers
Learn how to create a successful marketing automation strategy.
4. Run target audience analysis
What is a target audience analysis? Target audience is when you research a spectrum of demographics and psychographics, then analyze them to collect useful insights about your consumer insights, customer pain points, and buyer personas.
There are many ways that you can run a target audience analysis, including:
- Analyzing your offerings and the problems your products and services solve.
- Conducting market research.
- Creating customer profiles and market segments
- Assessing the competition
- Running surveys, collecting feedback and testimonials
- Studying Google analytics reports and Facebook insights
Final takeaways
Using the right audience for your campaign is very crucial to reach people that will respond to your campaigns. You can target your audiences by creating segments based on groups of people, such as opt-ins to your email list, lead magnet downloads, or visits to a product page or social media impressions.
Here are some key takeaways:
- Cold audiences are difficult to target because they don’t know your business. Target them using Facebook Lookalike Audiences and LinkedIn Matched Audiences.
- Warm audiences are familiar with your business but have bought nothing from you. Target them using Facebook Custom Audiences, Google Customer Match, and LinkedIn Matched Audiences.
- Customers are people who have interacted and done business with you. Target them by using Facebook Lifetime Value Audiences or TikTok Custom Audiences, to create a similar audience to your existing customers.
Build effective ads by targeting your ideal custom audience with LeadsBridge.