Ecommerce

Audience Targeting Strategies for the Data-Driven Marketer

By Tinuiti Team
woman in crowd portraying audience targeting

Are you struggling to connect with the audience that would benefit from your products or services? Mastering audience targeting can transform your marketing efforts, enabling more impactful campaigns that drive conversions.

In this post, we’ll explain what audience targeting is and offer actionable strategies you can use to maximize campaign effectiveness. But we cover a lot of material — so feel free to use the jumplinks below to immediately skip to the section you’d like to read.

Table of Contents:

What Is Audience Targeting?

Audience targeting is a strategy that focuses marketing efforts on the consumers most likely to purchase your products or services. The goal is to identify key segments that show similar interests, purchasing behaviors, and needs. By leveraging these insights, you can deliver highly personalized and timely content, maximizing conversion rates.

Here’s why you need to target the right audience:

We’ll explain how to target audiences in detail below, but here’s a brief rundown of how it works: First, brands build customer personas by gathering demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. Next, they activate campaigns targeting these segments. They then continuously test and refine campaigns using split testing and other key techniques.

Types of Audience Targeting Strategies

Understanding the types of audience targeting strategies is crucial for any marketer aiming to deliver personalized and impactful campaigns. Let’s explore the different approaches that can help you effectively connect with your ideal audience.

Demographics

Demographic audience targeting involves segmenting your audience based on factors like age, education level, gender, income, familial status, and occupation. However, it also includes geographic information, including where consumers live, go to school, shop, work, and more.

It’s often possible to achieve quantitative grouping since these attributes are intrinsic and usually observable. Once they’re known, it’s easier for you to create campaigns that speak to the specific needs of those groups. For example, a luxury fashion brand might target high-income consumers aged 30-50, while a children’s toy company could focus on parents aged 25-40.

Did you know that one of the earliest printed English advertisements was drafted in the 1400s, designed to sell a handbook for priests? To pique their interest, the flier mentioned that all information within was not only accurate but also one of the least expensive options on the market. The advertiser knew priests were concerned with saving money since their income was fixed, and used that information as a central selling point.

Psychographics

Pyschographic audience targeting goes beyond basic demographic information to explore the lifestyles, values, interests, and attitudes of your audience. By understanding their motivations, you can more easily target the psychological factors that drive consumer behavior.

You might ask: What leisure activities do they engage in? What are they trying to accomplish in the short-term or long-term? What are their values and opinions? What lifestyle groups do they belong to?

Psychographics became mainstream much later than demographics, with the idea originally popularized in the US during World War I. It wasn’t until 1965 that the term was coined, and it experienced a massive surge in popularity during the 2000s and 2010s as digital marketing made it easier to target campaigns based on an individual’s exact interests and opinions.

Behavioral

Behavioral marketing is the newest form of audience targeting, emerging as the internet became inseparable from daily life. It can be something as simple as sending an abandoned cart email or as complex as studying someone’s wider online behavior to understand their immediate needs.

Behavioral targeting uses data that reflects a consumer’s immediate mindset and influences their likelihood to purchase. This includes the websites they visit, the content they engage with, past purchasing behaviors, and web searches they perform. Leveraging this data helps marketers make educated assumptions about a consumer’s thoughts and predict their next action, which moves them along the sales funnel.

Although marketers that use behavioral targeting have enjoyed much success, it’s no panacea. Ethical and legal dilemmas regarding data privacy have created barriers to collecting, storing, and using personal information.

For certain channels, like paid marketing, the throughline between behaviors and actions is increasingly difficult for marketers to determine without specialized marketing technology. However, email and SMS channels can offer integrated solutions to track on-site behavior if users opt in, highlighting the need for consent in marketing programs.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting involves placing ads on web pages or within content that’s directly relevant to the ad’s subject matter. Unlike behavioral targeting which focuses on a user’s past activities, it considers the context of the content they’re currently engaging with. Essentially, it ensures that ads are shown to users in environments that align with the ad’s message.

This approach is quickly growing in popularity since it has the benefits of behavioral marketing while also enhancing how relevant your marketing material is to the target consumer.

For example, If someone is reading a blog post about mountain biking, they may be interested in shopping at an outdoor recreation store. You could run a display ad on that blog. Or, if you own the blog, you could use on-site personalization to engage with this interest directly.

Some of these throughlines are simple, like the example above. Others can be more abstract based on how well you understand your audience. For instance, you might find that mountain bikers are also interested in local craft beer, and purchase ad space accordingly.

How to Use Data for Audience Targeting

Leveraging data for audience targeting allows marketers to precisely segment their audience, delivering personalized and relevant campaigns that drive higher engagement and better ROI. But before we examine the types of data and how to use them, let’s take a look at some of the tools you’ll need.

As a baseline, you should have access to an email service provider (ESP) or customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Using these tools, you can build audiences using first-party data.

Enterprise brands may also want to invest in customer data platforms (CDP). These are ideal for well-established businesses as they enable brands to get the most detailed view of individual customers. Data management platforms (DMPs) can also help marketers discover and activate new customer segments.

With that out of the way, let’s explore how to harness consumer data and optimize your targeting strategies.

First-Party Data

First-party data (1PD) is the information your company collects directly from customers through its channels and interactions. It’s owned by the company and includes things like customer lists, social media followers, and on-site or in-app activity.

You can collect first-party data through a variety of sources, including your website, mobile apps, social media platforms, email campaigns, and direct customer interactions like surveys and purchase histories.

Since the data is highly reliable and accurate, it should be your priority for audience targeting. Use the Pareto Principle to gather data on the 20% of customers that drive 80% of your revenue, then use the data to build your personas.

If you don’t already have audience targeting in place, begin targeting consumers based on their funnel location. Collect data about who is engaging positively with the outreach efforts and double down on these segments.

If your audience targeting strategy is more mature, segment these groups into a handful of personas. Summarize how they tend to behave and what they’re interested in, then use these personas to write better messaging, craft creative assets, and find where else they might be active on the internet.

Second-Party Data

Second-party data (2PD) is another company’s first-party data that you’ve bought or received as part of a partnership. Once you understand your target audience as much as possible through first-party data, second-party sources can be a great way to expand.

Essentially, second-party data helps you attract consumers who don’t know your brand yet but share commonalities with your target personas.

Using a demand-side platform (DSP) allows you to get the most out of second-party data. You can access another organization’s data and use it to buy ad space and manage those media buys.

For example, say a skincare brand knows that younger customers buy moisturizers and sunscreen. They can buy ads through Target/Roundel’s retail media network which targets people who buy facial moisturizers and sunscreen at Target.

Third-Party Data

Unlike first-party data, third-party data (3PD) is collected by companies that aren’t directly interacting with the customers. Companies may acquire the data through mediums like cookies or purchase the data from vendors who have gathered it from various sources, using it in the hope of reaching new or broader audiences.

An example is third-party cookies which allow advertisers to track a user’s activity around the internet, including on non-owned websites, without needing a partnership with those external sites. This could be used in a myriad of ways, such as buying display ads on that non-owned website that bring users to your site. Once they’re on your site, you can capture first-party data, refine your personas, and optimize your audience targeting strategy.

However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to acquire and use third-party data due to privacy regulations. Yet despite industry challenges, third-party data remains a powerful way to spread awareness among people who haven’t heard of your brand yet.

Step-by-Step Guide to Reach Your Target Audience

Reaching your target audience effectively requires a well-defined strategy. In this section, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide to help you identify, engage, and convert your ideal customers.

1. Segment Your Customers

To segment your customers effectively, first-party data is critical. An easy way to start is by tracking and analyzing user behavior on your site. Use unique identifiers like customer IDs, device IDs, or advertising IDs (such as IDFA) to track individual customer activity. Also collect opt-in data like first-party cookies, email addresses, and phone numbers. If you’d like to take things a step further, you can conduct surveys and collect insights from focus groups.

With a wealth of first-party data at your disposal, begin the segmentation process by identifying common characteristics. Group customers into segments based on their behaviors, interests, demographics, and purchasing patterns. Summarize how each group tends to behave to understand their preferences and pain points. Then, differentiate your personas further by considering their stage in the buying funnel—for instance, the messaging for a first-time purchaser should ideally be different compared to a repeat customer.

Then, you can use these personas to guide how and when you message your customers. Craft personalized messaging and creative assets that resonate with each persona. Understand where each segment is most active and focus your campaigns on those channels, whether it’s social media platforms, email marketing, SMS, or paid advertising.

However, it’s important to start small. If you cast too wide a net and target large groups of your audience with only basic data, you may end up wasting time and resources. Begin with the most promising segments and refine your approach based on their engagement and conversion rates.

At the same time, while it’s important to be focused, don’t limit your audience excessively. Often, testing your messaging on a larger audience yields the highest return. For example, platforms like Google ads require a minimum audience size to access insights and achieve scale.

2. Design Campaigns for Audience Segments

When designing campaigns for specific audience segments, it’s important to align your strategies with the stages of the customer journey. These include the awareness, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages.

It’s also crucial to design your campaigns to meet goals that are supported by quantitative KPIs. Without these, you’ll have no way to track success or optimize your efforts. Here are a few things to think about for each stage:

Awareness

At the awareness stage, your goal is to build interest and make potential customers aware of your brand. You could target them using lookalike audience campaigns on social media. For instance, create a lookalike based on top-performing customers using your 1PD to identify customers who resemble your most valuable existing customers.

Also, think about the platforms where your audience is most active—whether it’s social media, search engines, or content networks—and concentrate your advertising efforts there.

Example: e.l.f. Cosmetics wanted to increase awareness and brand interest among the Latinx community. Tinuiti helped e.l.f Cosmetics leverage unique cultural content and high-visibility events to gain awareness. With a music video from reggaeton singer Manuel Turizo and ad placements in the Latin Grammys, it significantly boosted awareness and engagement with their target audience.

Pre-purchase

In the pre-purchase stage, you need to persuade potential customers to buy your product or service. One way is by using display ads to retarget users who have visited specific product pages but haven’t converted. By retargeting them with ads showcasing the product they viewed along with features, reviews, or special offers, you can move them closer to making a decision.

Example: With Tinuiti’s help, e.l.f. Cosmetics successfully crossed language barriers and engaged both English and Spanish-speaking segments, increasing performance metrics including video view rate (VVR) and click-through rates, boosting interest further.

Purchase

The purchase stage is critical, and your campaigns at this point should focus on converting interest into sales. To entice customers, you could use personalized email campaigns based on purchase history. If one segment has a history of purchasing from the men’s category, have the main image show menswear with a CTA directing to shop for men’s items.

However, keeping frequency and ad fatigue in mind is essential. Bombarding potential buyers with too many offers can be counterproductive and may drive them away.

Example: Brooks Brothers wanted to increase conversions in their millennial audience. Tinuiti leveraged back-end data from platforms like Netflix and Hulu to tailor the brand’s messaging to millennials. Tinuiti also added QR codes into ads which led viewers directly to the Brooks Brothers’ website, altogether increasing conversions by 20%.

Retention

Post-purchase retention strategies aim to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. An example marketing strategy could be to use location-based push notifications. Using geolocation data, you could send notifications to app users when they’re near a key location (like a cafe). When lapsed users are within a 2-mile radius, a special offer might be all it takes to bring them back.

In all of these steps, personalization also plays a key role. Consider tailoring your headlines, CTAs, and landing pages to reflect the interests of different segments. Keep in mind that personalization doesn’t always need to be a huge overhaul of your creative assets—it could be something as simple as small changes to CTAs, headlines, and the number of categories you feature.

3. Benchmark Existing Campaigns

Effective audience targeting hinges on the ability to measure and evaluate the success of your campaigns. Start by establishing relevant KPIs for these benchmarks. Common KPIs to consider include click-through rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates. However, depending on your specific objectives, metrics like cost per acquisition (CPA) and customer lifetime value (CLV) may also help.

Once you’ve defined these metrics, collect baseline data that reflects your campaign performance prior to implementing or refining your audience-targeting strategy. These benchmarks will serve as a point of comparison to measure the success of your new initiatives.

For example, if one of your KPIs is click-through rate, assess what it was before you personalized your campaigns and compare it to the CTR after implementation. This will help you understand the direct impact of your strategies on user actions, helping you determine whether your new approach is effective.

As you implement targeting strategies across various channels, weigh their performance impact on broader business KPIs. Benchmarking can help by offering a comprehensive overview of campaign effectiveness on both a micro and macro level. Not all efforts will drive the same level of impact, and benchmarks will help you identify which strategies are worth continuing, tweaking, or discarding.

4. Launch Targeted Campaigns & Collect Data

Great audience-targeting strategies are always evolving. While the fundamental structure of a persona may stay the same, the exact way of messaging them should change depending on the data. That’s why collecting data is so important.

Data collection lets you get a granular view of how different audience segments respond to various message tones, formats, and channels. Use that data to conduct A/B testing and see whether they respond more to your targeted campaigns or more of a general approach.

For instance, you can run two different versions of campaigns, one highly targeted and the other more general, then compare their performance. Monitor key metrics to see which yields the better results. Does the personalized email subject line result in higher open rates? Does a tailored landing page lead to more conversions? These small, controlled tests provide valuable information into whether your targeting initiatives are having an impact.

“A winning media strategy is one that works together. As you learn what’s working and where, continue testing and scaling across platforms. For example, if you’re finding that consumers are really loving and talking about product A on Reddit, start pushing paid dollars there, and pushing messaging about Product A into your Search, TVAD, and Social channels. This cross-sharing and pivoting will significantly elevate your media strategy and drive much greater ROI across the entire business.” – Jack Johnson

5. Study Outcomes & Repeat

Once your campaigns have reached a statistically significant audience, it’s time to assess their performance by comparing the results against the benchmarks you initially collected. Look at how different segments are engaging with your content. Are they clicking through? Are they converting?

For those in your audience group who are not taking positive actions, identify the potential reasons. Use this information to target them with a different campaign, or use a more generalized message to see if the lack of engagement is due to overly specific targeting.

Also consider whether the issue lies with the channels you’re using or targeting parameters, rather than with the campaign itself. If a particular segment isn’t interacting as expected, try using a different platform to reach them. Likewise, your audience criteria may need adjustment to better capture those who will engage.

Studying outcomes and iterating helps refine your strategies, ensuring that you’re continuously improving and maximizing the impact of your marketing efforts. By regularly revisiting and revising your tactics based on real-world data, you can build more effective, dynamic campaigns that better meet the needs of your audience segments.

Audience Targeting Tips for Q4

If you’re reading this in the second half of the year, there’s a 25% chance you’re preparing to bolster your marketing spend very soon. However, more spending isn’t always better — rather, it often comes down to who you target, and how you reach them.

This is especially important for targeting audiences in the US during Q4 2024. Marketers aren’t just competing against other marketers – they’re also competing against political organizations leading into the 2024 election. With this unique situation in mind, we reached out to one of our resident advertising experts, Jack Johnson. He has the following advice:

If you’re interested in learning more about how to refine your audience targeting strategy in Q4, check out our new webinar series, the 2024 Playbook for Q4 and Holiday Success.

Conclusion

Effective audience targeting requires a mix of strategies and data-driven optimization. By defining your audience, understanding the types of segmentation, and leveraging consumer data, you can create highly personalized campaigns that drive conversions.

Ready to level up your approach to audience targeting? Learn about how Tinuiti’s Bliss Point measurement solution can help you reach your target audiences with the most effective messaging on the right channels.