Have you ever considered who your target market is? You probably know. So you know who buys your products and uses your services, How do you target them effectively?
Facebook ads are possibly the most effective way of targeting a specific consumer demographic online. Facebook ads allow you to construct a highly detailed portrait of the users you would like to target. Users can be identified and targeted through one of several different attributes, a combination of them, or all of them.
Keyword targeting is the fundamental part of Facebook ads Facebooks ads identify potential customers by the profile you build of them – age, location (Country or even City), sex, education, relationship status and even by birthday. Users can also be targeted by their interests, such as if they are a fan or a member of a certain group or have attended certain events they can be specifically targeted through Facebooks connection targeting.
Marketing experts have described Facebook ads as a dream marketing tool.
Google AdWords is another highly effective way of targeting your potential customers. Google AdWords places a sponsored link at the top of Google search results, this is known as paid search marketing. AdWords can be used to target users who search for a specific keyword or phrase, geo-targeting can also be used here. Paid Search Marketing is a very effective tool for businesses, especially those who are not present or have a poor ranking organically. There is one minor stumbling block for Paid Search Marketing, and that is, that only between 4 – 9% of internet users look at the sponsored listings before they look at the organic listings, dramatically reducing your potential audience.
One of the newly emerging ways of target marketing is Twit Hawk. Twit Hawk is real time target marketing on Twitter. It finds users on Twitter who are in your desired location, or are talking about a topic. It provides you with a list of these users every half an hour or every week whatever you require, you can then tweet at them (costing only a few pence) and the average cost per click is only a couple of pence. This is a very cheap way of making contact with a highly qualified lead. There is the ability to fully track the progress of each campaign onsite, with the integrated Google Analytics software.
Amazon, one of the world’s largest online retailers uses a very unique way of targeting its’ customers. Amazon tracks the product searches of their users, and periodically e-mail them offers on the items they have been looking it. Amazon also have a very intelligent home page, it displays items which you have recently looked at and suggestions for you. Not only does this kind of detailed target marketing save the customer time by not having to search the product again, but it also encourages impulse buying. eBay has a similar homepage and they also e-mail customers their recommendations.
Believe it or not, many local businesses are still pumping thousands of pounds a year into an ever shrinking Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages is a great example of marketing to the mass market, as it offers no target marketing whatsoever. Once you place an ad in the Yellow Pages it is there for one year, it cannot be optimised or changed like an online advert can. There is also no way to track the effectiveness of a Yellow Pages advert.
Did you even open your copy of the Yellow Pages this year? There are websites which are actively encouraging people to opt out of the Yellow Pages and other pieces of junk mail to reduce paper and energy consumption.
Over the next couple of years, targeting your ideal client will become very simple indeed. With the introduction of location based services such as auto-fire SMS specific targeting will become very simple. In the future, it is conceivable that a person will only ever see adverts that are relevant to them.