How To Create The Right Audience Profile For Your Paid Media Campaigns
Good marketing is all about creating meaningful connections between brands and their customers, and the first step to achieving that is getting to know your audience. Here's how to create the right audience profile for your paid media campaigns:
Don't make assumptions
Source reliable and well-rounded audience insights
Keep your audience profiles up to date
First impressions count, and if your ads look or sound irrelevant to your target audience, they’ll just keep on scrolling.
Don’t make assumptions
It might sound obvious, but our first piece of advice when defining your target audience is don’t rely on assumptions. The same goes for both local and international audiences. A platform that works for marketing to Gen Z in one country might get very little use in another; in the same way, messages which resonate with people living in a city in one part of the country might fall flat on those in more rural areas.
Assuming everyone has the same frame of reference or working off stereotypes will lead to irrelevancy in the best-case scenario and offence in the worst.
Our recommendation is to always do your research and base your audience strategy on data-driven insights, which brings us to our next point:
Source reliable and well-rounded audience insights
We use insights to define every aspect of our campaigns, from creative strategy to ad placement and budget phasing. Using a range of reliable first- and third-party data helps us to form the audience that ultimately underpins the success of our campaigns. Demographics, psychographics, digital, linguistic and cultural insights are just a few of the key areas we look at to understand what differentiates and defines a target customer and how they might interact with a brand.
It can be a good idea to start at the top on a macro level, sourcing country-level insights such as disposable income, national holidays and search engine usage, before honing in and refining to your particular market segment, getting to know the specifics of when, where, how and why they engage with paid media ads. Your target audience might all use Facebook in their personal life, but do they really want to see ads for your B2B product when they’re scrolling through their feed?
In practical terms, Google Analytics is a great starting tool to get a wealth of insights on your existing customers. Promoting surveys, quizzes, gated content, etc. as a method of collecting first-party data about your target audience is also particularly powerful when looking for really specific and up-to-date insight. Platforms like SimilarWeb and Quantcast Measure take that to the next level by providing more data on competitors and customer behaviour outside of your site. Meanwhile, Statista, eMarketer, and Global Web Index are all fantastic for gaining third-party insights when you might be thinking about targeting some new audiences or markets.
Keep your audience profiles up to date
Last but not least—and looping back to the start and our advice to ‘never assume anything'—bear in mind that people and culture change over time. Creative that may have worked once might not last forever.
By keeping up to date with what’s happening in the world of your target audience you can create campaigns that are relevant and meaningful. Whether that is the pandemic pushing previously internet-illiterate consumers online or younger generations demanding more diverse representation in advertising, being aware of these changes and being willing to test and adapt creative messaging ensures your brand stays relevant in whatever market you are selling into.
So, how do you create the right audience profile for your paid media campaign? In short, don’t rely on assumptions; build audiences based on data; test, learn and keep an open mind!
As an international paid media agency, Clickoo has been creating audience-driven campaigns for over 10 years.
Here they share their experiences and tips for targeting the right audiences for your campaigns across any paid media platform.
Thanks to Clickoo for putting this brilliant blog together and for sharing these insights into how to create the right audience profile for your paid media campaigns. 🙌🏽
To find out how Clickoo & Bearded Fellows can support you to achieve your campaign goals - Get in touch!