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Digital Marketing: Targeting Audiences Effectively

A person sits at a laptop with a calculator on the table, they analyse the results of their digital marketing on a graph protruding from the screen.

Digital marketing continues to be an effective method for business growth, sales and expansion online. The UK’s ad market grew by 6.1% to a net worth of £36.6 billion in 2023, with online formats now accounting for over three-quarters of all UK ad spend for the first time ever.

Research from the end of 2023, saw 81% of the UK’s SMEs stating the importance of digital marketing to the success of their business. 74% also believe it delivers a good return on investment. Therefore, it becomes apparent that employing digital marketing not only grows the economy but businesses too.

Further growth of 4.5% is expected in 2025, by which time the UK’s ad market will be worth more than £40 billion. So, how can you utilise digital marketing to target audiences effectively?

Define your target audience

The best way to target audiences effectively is to establish your core demographic criteria, such as gender, location and age.

From there, you can refine your audience by incorporating specific interests, behaviours, and lifestyle factors, such as frequent travellers or online shoppers.

This precise segmentation enables more strategic and effective marketing initiatives. Tailoring these details also allows for more focused and effective marketing efforts. You can then regularly analyse your campaign data, and based on performance, adjust your targeting to ensure you’re reaching the most relevant audiences for your business.

Utilise platform-specific targeting

Your target audience definitions will also be informed by which platform you are choosing to advertise on. Each one will have slightly different parameters by which to set up your digital marketing. It’s good to be familiar with each one to have a better overview of which would be more beneficial to your business.

Facebook and Instagram (Meta)

Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta and so their digital marketing specifications are the same. Their facilities allow you to leverage detailed demographics, interests and behavioural targeting. You can create custom audiences from your website, customer databases, lead generation forms, and through engagement on your business’s social media.

You can also use lookalike audiences, which use some of the same parameters as your custom audience. Then you can decide how closely these will be followed. They’re an effective way to catch a few more eyes than your initial targeting might find.

LinkedIn’s advertising capabilities allow you to be ultra specific on a professional level. You can target people by their job titles, the industries they work in and the size of their company. The platform also notes that LinkedIn’s user base has twice the buying power of the average web audience. So, if your digital marketing campaign would be effective to users of LinkedIn, your campaigns could be doubly effective.

X

Advertising on X focuses on followers’ interests, behaviours, and keywords as well as custom audiences. You can use demographic targeting to reach people based on location, language, device, age, and gender.

You can also define audience types to serve advertising based on conservations, events, interests, movies, follower look-alikes and more.

Google PPC

Google ads have two powerful ways of advertising to people, through the use of keywords or through audiences. Whether you’re running a Search or Display campaign, Google offers four categories to segment your target audience.

The first is detailed demographic targeting which is slightly more specific than the basics. These look at life and career stages, for example whether someone is married, their level of education or whether they’re a homeowner.

The other functions are mostly like the options that you’ll find with social media marketing. These look at interests, hobbies, habits and shopping behaviours. The final segment is ‘life event targeting’ which allows digital marketers to target people going through a significant life transition. For example, this could be people who are moving to a different city or graduating university.

Segmenting audiences

As well as choosing a custom audience, you can also segment your audiences for even further personalisation in your digital marketing. Segmentation groups customers together around one characteristic. This can be effective for businesses that are proactively looking into their advertising results in real time.

Segmentation allows for better customer retention by showing fewer ads to less responsive audiences. It can also better appeal to audience members who appear to be on the fence. Segmenting these people can allow for upselling, special offers and more. By creating different ads for new customers versus returning customers, for example, you can experimentalise with your digital marketing.

A/B Testing

As above, A/B testing allows businesses to see which ads are running effectively and which audience members are more responsive. This doesn’t just apply to audience targeting but also to creative and content assets.

For example, advertisers can try switching from static images to videos to see if this is more effective. It can be good practice to question the content to find out whether the target audience can relate to the image and whether the copy is grabbing them.

It is also handy to note that plenty of digital marketing platforms can automatically A/B test your ad’s content for you. Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Twitter will all cycle through different elements of your campaign to try and present the optimal ad to audiences. Automated A/B testing is built in to optimise each campaign run for the best results.

Monitor and adjust

Effective audience targeting requires ongoing monitoring and optimisation of our digital marketing efforts. Regularly assess the performance of your campaigns by tracking key metrics and adjusting strategies as needed. Test multiple campaign variations, refresh creative assets, and ensure copy remains relevant to your audience. Since audience behaviours and market trends can shift frequently, it’s crucial to stay agile and responsive.

By analysing past performance data, you can gain valuable insights that inform and refine your strategy, ensuring your marketing efforts remain impactful and aligned with evolving audience needs.