How Digital Advertising Can Help You Reach Your Target Audience

What is Digital Advertising?

Digital advertising refers to marketing completed through online channels (e.g., websites, streaming platforms, email, etc.). It can come in a wide range of formats, like search engine marketing (SEM), display ads, paid social ads, and more. Over the last decade, the popularity of digital advertising has skyrocketed as people have started to rely on the internet more and more throughout their daily lives. A 2023 study by Statista found that the average person worldwide spends almost seven hours online daily. Compounded by the growing popularity of smartphones, the internet has never been more accessible or mobile than it is now, meaning there are even more opportunities for brands to reach consumers where they’re already spending their time through digital ads.

Compared to traditional advertising, which includes marketing tactics that don’t rely on the internet (e.g., billboard or radio ads), digital ads provide more flexibility when it comes to budget, launch time, and the ability to make changes mid-campaign. Digital ads also offer precision through the variety of targeting methods they offer. This is another reason digital ads are an ideal option for marketers versus traditional ads, which can only reach individuals who come across them. For instance, if you sell fire pits, you’d want to reach individuals interested in outdoor activities like hiking or camping since they are more likely to be interested in your product. With digital ads, you can reach those individuals who have either expressed interest in outdoor activities or reengage shoppers who have browsed your products but not purchased, thus making it easier for you to find and reach your target audience.

What is a Target Audience?

But what exactly is a target audience? A target audience is a specific group of people you want to reach with your marketing efforts because they are the most likely to be interested in what you’re selling and, in turn, most likely to bring in sales. These people generally have a few shared characteristics that make them the best fit for your product or service, and these characteristics can be demographic (age, gender, location), psychographic (interests, values, goals), or behavioral (product usage, purchase history, etc.). Defining your target audience(s) should be one of the first things you do when creating a marketing plan, as they will guide your marketing decisions, from the content of your ads to their placement on platforms. Luckily, digital advertising makes it easy to find and reach your target audience, so we’ll explain that you can leverage digital ad tools to narrow down your focus and only target individuals most receptive to your message.

Using Digital Advertising to Reach Your Target Audience

Pay Attention to Your Competition
Your competitors are considered competition for a reason; you offer similar products or services, share similar goals, and have overlapping target audiences, meaning there’s much to learn from them and their marketing efforts. Utilizing basic market research, social listening tools and geo-framing technology can give you a good idea of what’s working well for them and what tactics might be worth implementing in your marketing strategy without needing access to their internal data or marketing strategies.

For instance, paying attention to the competition’s social media profiles is a quick (and free!) way to get insight into what type of content they’re posting, who’s interacting with their posts, which of their content gets the most engagement, etc. By paying attention to these metrics, you’ll gain valuable insight into your competitors’ target audiences and how they reach those individuals. Similarly, social listening tools allow you to monitor keywords and hashtags coming from your target audience and keep track of the general online discourse around your company. This makes them a great tool for further refining your target audiences, as you can uncover their niche interests and values and see who is engaged with your brand online.

Working with an ad company with access to geo-framing technology, which is similar to geo-targeting but much more accurate, is another easy way to keep track of your competition. At Esquire Advertising, for example, our proprietary geo-framing technology allows us to frame up the four walls of any competitor location and capture the device information of any consumer who enters the building. Once they leave the competitor location, we continue targeting them with digital ads across all their devices. This allows us to measure foot traffic at competitor locations and demographic information about their customers since we can identify who goes into their store. To learn more, visit our website.

Build Stronger and More Connections with Your Customers
Customer engagement is easier than ever with digital advertising since brands can now communicate with their shoppers and build stronger connections in real time by meeting them where they are — online. Interacting through comments, likes, and reposts on social ads or posts is a great way to engage with your target audience and can help increase your brand’s visibility since these individuals may share your content for their own personal connections to see. Digital ads also aren’t limited geographically so that you can reach and connect with your target audience at a much larger scale but at a lower cost compared to traditional advertising, allowing you to expand your brand’s awareness beyond your geographic location. As these customers engage more with your brand, they’ll become more active participants in your brand’s story, which helps establish a strong sense of brand loyalty amongst these individuals.

Digital ads also make the consumer shopping experience much smoother, as customers can take immediate action after viewing an ad, such as clicking a link or making a purchase. Shoppers will always prefer brands that make it easy to shop, and so that’s another way digital ads can help grow brand loyalty. Even if these individuals don’t make a purchase immediately, they’ll stay connected with your brand and give you a chance to interact with them in the future.

Use Analytics to Track Your Results
To determine if a marketing strategy works, you must see how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately brings in. With digital advertising, monitoring results is very simple. There are countless apps and platforms that automatically track your lead-to-conversion rate, whether that’s text response rates, direct purchases, or website visits. Likewise, if you’ve already done some digital advertising, your data is already being tracked. You can use tools like Google Analytics or in-app Social Media Analytics to view your data and get an idea of your campaign’s performance.

Analyzing the campaign’s data can also provide deeper insight into your target audience and their interests, which can, in turn, help you deliver a higher level of personalization in your digital ads. Research has shown that the better a brand can demonstrate that it understands its customers’ needs and wants, the more likely customers will respond to advertising and engage with the brand. In fact, 71% of customers prefer personalized advertisements to broadly targeted ads. It is important to note that target audiences can become fairly broad, so it’s important to segment your audience to ensure each sub-group gets personalized and effective messaging.

Of course, the best way to find success with your digital ad campaign is to stay flexible, adapt to new information, and continuously test out different variables with your ads, such as changing the copy or the visual assets to altering your audience segments and budget. Each new ad comes with a new opportunity to improve upon what you’ve already done and learn how to do better in the future.

Do you need help reaching your target audience? Esquire Advertising is a full-service, in-house advertising and marketing agency specializing in hyper-targeted, audience-based advertising. We work with a variety of clients to boost their brand awareness, provide in-depth market insights, and produce trackable campaign results through a unique combination of marketing strategies and our proprietary technology.