Many organizations around the world are spending more and more budget to get their marketing messages across to their audience and grow their business. One of the most popular and effective ways to spread a marketing message is through online advertising. But the question is, how to build advertising strategies that get you the best return on your marketing expenses?
In this post, we will introduce target ads, and show you how to do ad targeting.
What is Targeted Advertising?
Running a target ad is essentially about getting to the right audience, at the right place, and at the right time. If you are running a business and want to know how to run effective target ads, you have come to the right place.
When you want to run a marketing campaign, the first step is to identify your targeted customers, where they are, and when to reach them. The more specific you are about your target audience, the easier it will be to create relevant messages for them. As a result, you will achieve better campaign performances and get higher returns on your marketing expenses. You can run target ads for promoting any kind of product or service.
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There are many channels or venues to run a target ad. The most commonly used ones these days are Google, Facebook, and Instagram. If a business is running paid ads to promote its products or services, it would be using at least one of these platforms.
The Basics of a Target Ad
To help you understand the concept of target ads better, let’s discuss the basics of targeted advertising. If you continue reading this post until the end, you will learn what targeted advertising entails, how it is important for your business, and how it works to increase your sales.
Let’s say you run a retail shop and sell sustainable goods. Your shop is located in a great location in the city. Your business is doing well, and you want to expand it further by getting into digital advertising. You want to enhance your brand’s online presence.
You decide to set a Facebook ad campaign. After launching the campaign, you sit back and wait for the new sales to start rolling in. To your surprise, nothing happens! What could have possibly gone wrong here?
You need to make sure in online advertising that you target your ads to the right people. Even if you use the right visuals, write the correct taglines, and offer an amazing deal, your ads won’t get you any responses or results if you show them to the wrong people.
For example, suppose you offer a durable bamboo lunchbox and target your ads to an audience with zero interest in such sustainable lifestyle products. In that case, you’d be burning away the money spent on these ads.
With a target ad, your campaign will be set to be shown to a specific audience based on their demographics, interests, location, behaviors, and other such metrics. This way, you will create more personalized ad sets that the audience can resonate with. This will lead to a high conversion rate and more return on your advertising expenses.
Now let’s apply this concept to the bamboo lunchbox campaign. You could opt to target your ads to commuting men and women, aged between 18 and 45 years, who live in the locations where you can deliver or ship your goods and are interested in traveling and sustainable products. If this is how you run your target ads, you will be showing the ads to people who are more likely to be interested in your offer.
However, one downside of target ads is that if you make your audience pool too specific, you could make your reach too small, as very few people would fit into the specific requirements you set. It takes a bit of practice to set the ideal audience size and optimize the targeting options of your ads. But it is not too difficult to get there.
When you serve correctly targeted ads, you will be optimizing the use of your marketing budget. Only those people will view your target ads that are within your buyer persona. This increases your advertising efficiency and decreases your costs.
Businesses that run successful target ads create a sales funnel as part of their advertising campaigns.
How a Target Ad Works?
Now that you know what targeted advertising is and why it is crucial, it is time to learn how target ads work. One of the most critical steps in creating a target ad is building a sales or marketing funnel.
In a sales funnel, consumers are made through different stages of their buying process, starting from the first time they hear about a product and ending at the stage when they finally make the purchase. In between these two stages, a customer might take several other desired actions, such as filling up the website’s contact form to make an inquiry about one of its products.
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Successful marketers are those who can design advertising campaigns keeping the consumer journey in mind. This allows them to reach the right customer at the right place and time.
Developing a solid marketing funnel is the key to running successful target ads. This not only applies to Google, Facebook, or Instagram ads but generally to all types of marketing activities. It is basically how you want your target audience to flow all the way until they reach your desired goal.
Building a sales funnel is a must if you want to generate more traffic to your website, get more subscribers to build an email list, and increase your sales. This funnel is like an upside-down pyramid and has several layers in it. Each layer represents a stage that a prospect or potential customer passes through in their decision-making process to buy a product.
The first stage of this funnel is the first goal that a target ad is supposed to achieve, and that is, getting brand awareness. The final stage is the sale, which is the ultimate goal of your targeted advertising.
With careful analysis of your target ads and their performance, you can identify what modifications need to be made to your advertising strategy to drive more sales transactions, higher sales volumes, and stronger loyalty for your brand.
5 Benefits of Running Target Ads
Here are 5 key advantages of targeted advertising.
1. It Saves Budget
Since a target ad would increase the conversion rate of your campaign, you would have to spend less on getting more sales if you set up the ads properly. This means target ads can save your budget to a large extent.
2. It Saves Time
You wouldn’t have to run the same campaign again and again to achieve a certain level of sales. This saves time, as you can foresee the rapid growth and expansion through the success of your target ad campaigns.
3. It Increases Brand Awareness
When you show your ads to the right people, even if they don’t buy on the spot, you are at least able to increase your brand awareness among them. Since the audience of your ads will resonate with your message, they wouldn’t feel annoyed with your ads and wouldn’t at least block them. This is good for your brand image as well.
4. It Gives You an Edge Over Your Competitors
Running a successful target ad can give you a competitive edge over other brands. This is because when you show a message to the right people, the least they do is engage with it and might even share it further. This means your audience will begin to prefer your brand over the other players in the industry.
5. It Provides Valuable Insights About Your Audience
Targeted advertising allows you to access valuable insights about your audience. This means the more target ads you run, the more data you can collect about your niche. You will learn about the changing trends in their behaviors and preferences. This, in turn, will help you develop and maintain strong customer relationships so that you not only sell to them once but can continue to influence them to get repeat purchases.
Running Target Ads With a Strikingly Website
If you have a website built on Strikingly, you can access your site’s visitors or audience list from your editor. When you run a target ad intending to drive traffic to the site, you can check if it is effective or not by observing this audience list. If more people visit your site when your ad campaign is running and convert in any way, it means your ads are being targeted to the right people who are showing interest by opening your site and taking the desired action.
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We also provide another feature through which you can roughly check the effectiveness of your target ads. These are your website statistics, accessible from your Strikingly dashboard.
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These stats are like your website’s analytics and might show slightly different data than Google Analytics (if your website is connected to Google Analytics). They show the number of people who visit your website each day. If two people browse your site from the same IP, they will be counted as one visitor. The stats do not show the visitor’s name, email address, or other details like the audience list, because these stats only count how many people opened your website, whether or not they took any desired action on it.
The tools available on Strikingly are well suited for running any kind of marketing campaign. If you have a business and need to create an online presence to boost your marketing efforts, our platform is the most convenient and practical place where you can do that. Our customer support team takes care of any technical issues our users face with their website and keeps coming up with new updates to provide more and more features that make your marketing efforts easier.
