For most people, marketing is the work involved with trying to get a product or service in front of an audience that is willing to pay for it. Once in a great while, however, there are situations where the customers are automatically seeking out the products so very little (if any) real marketing effort is needed. For example, if you’re able to set up a beer stand at a baseball game, you’ll have a line out the door for all nine innings.
For most people, the digital world doesn’t seem to offer these types of situations. It is seemingly impossible to get your product to be located in a place online where people are desperate to buy it. The fact is, however, that is not always true. With the right planning, you can make sure your ads are seen by the ideal audience so they will be reaching for their wallets before they even click your ad. The trick is to understand what needs to be done to accomplish this goal.
Targeting People – Not Places
The first step is going to be changing the way you look at digital advertising. In the past, most marketers would try to figure out where their target audience ‘hangs out’ online, and put their ads there. While this is a good start, the reality is that nobody spends all their time in one place online. Rather than targeting moms on a popular ‘mommy blog’ why not target the moms themselves no matter which sites they happen to be on. This is done through behavioral targeting, which is an effective solution that a growing number of ad networks are offering.
Choose Device Targeting Wisely
Many marketers make the mistake of thinking that they should have their ads displayed on all possible devices. While this is smart in some situations, it is actually quite ineffective for others. If, for example, you are running an ad for a local restaurant, mobile ads will perform far better than desktop ads. This is especially true for search phrases that include geographic identifiers. When setting up new ad campaigns, think about which types of devices will be most effective. If you’re not sure, you can always run some A/B split testing to see which works.
Harness Offline Data Providers
While there is a lot of data available about people online, you can often get key information from offline sources. You can get offline data about people from a variety of third party vendors that provide things like in-store purchase history, political donations, census data, location information and much more. When you have this data, combined with what is available online, you can get your ads placed more effectively.
