Entrepreneur and founder of PurpleBlack, an international, award-winning native advertising agency.
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What is the goal of any marketing campaign? To make the target audience notice the product or service. But, this can be a difficult task when there are so many platforms out there making it hard to know where to start.
Regardless, it is crucial to understand how your audience is using different platforms to target them accordingly. In this article, I will share my insights on how to effectively target new audiences using a new platform.
Audience Targeting Today
If you would like to revamp your targeting strategy, it is helpful to keep the following things in mind:
• Know your competition: Knowing who you’re competing against will help you decide where and when to advertise.
• Keep up with new trends: New social media sites, apps and other technologies are constantly being released, which means that marketing campaigns need to be updated regularly in order for them not to become obsolete.
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• Use different platforms: Targeting your audience according to their interests or occupations will help you reach them more effectively on social networks, email and websites. There are various ways to generate new audiences for your product using Facebook Ads or Google Ads, such as targeting people who like certain pages, or by interest and demographics.
Expanding Your Reach With Native Advertising
If you think about the platforms that you would typically use for your ads, Facebook Ads, Google Ads or Instagram ads likely come to mind. With these platforms, you can target your audience according to your data needs. Facebook Ads, for example, can allow companies to target exactly who they want, reaching a very specific audience set.
But there is one issue. You need people to have an account on these platforms in order to reach them. There are millions of people who don’t have access to social media platforms or simply prefer to stay off these platforms, which is why you will likely miss out on the opportunity to reach a different audience than the one you currently have.
If you would like to expand your reach, I suggest branching out to a relatively unknown means of advertising: native advertising.
Native ads are ads that don’t appear to be ads. Native advertising includes advertorials—the word “advertising and editorial” combined. They feel and look like regular articles, but they usually include a promoted product. Popular native advertising platforms include Taboola and Outbrain. These platforms help businesses create ads according to their needs and act as an intermediary between company and ad space provider. You can find them at the bottom of news articles, among the other articles, but with a “paid advertisement” sign.
The best thing about native advertising? You can reach an undeniably broad audience. The con is that it is impossible to specifically target according to interests or liked pages—you target a different way.
How To Target Via Native Ads
Before you continue reading, it is important to keep something in mind: Native advertising works best when working with a wide audience. So, your product needs to be applicable to a lot of people. If your product or service is only usable for a small group of people—say, women above 75—that will be too narrow.
Targeting people using native ads is straightforward. You can target specific audiences by stating it directly in the headline. An example is: “Tired of back pain? Everyone above 40 should try this pain-relieving innovation.”
In this heading, you will notice three elements: the problem that people are struggling with, the product that will fix the problem and the exact age of the target audience. Of course, people below 40 might read the article, but the point is that over 40-year-olds will feel spoken to, and therefore will be most likely to click on the advertorial.
Targeting happens not only via the heading, but also via image—for example, an elderly person or a young adult in the picture with whom people in that audience can associate themselves. The combination of both headline and image creates a specific feel to the ad that the right people will be drawn to. As a business, you can play with the words in the heading and switch them around to see what works best. To determine this, testing is needed.
When it comes to testing, specific testing platforms show the exact outcomes and numbers that the published advertorials have brought. As a beginner, you might have to do a lot of testing—adapting the advertorials over and over again, changing up words or full paragraphs, etc.—to see what people like to read most about in your niche.
In conclusion, you can build out your audience with native ads quite effortlessly if your product is suitable, the advertorial includes a specific heading and image, and you optimize your ads with testing.
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Author: Marcel Sattler, Forbes Councils Member
