Wondering how you can increase your sales? Or get more people talking about your business? Well, an organic approach might not always get you the results you need. You may face a lot of hiccups like restricted reach for your posts, less user engagement and so on. Especially when the algorithms of social platforms like Instagram and Facebook have become so stringent, you need an alternative to lean on to.

Here comes in targeted marketing! 

Defining your audience is a major task in targeted marketing. This can make or break your paid ads strategy. So before looking into more depth of how you can create a groundbreaking set of audience that can actually convert, let us see what are the benefits of targeted marketing for you.

#1 Shows your message directly to those who need

One of the biggest advantages of paid advertisement is that you can acutely target your audience so they receive your message directly. There’s no guesswork involved. With targeted marketing, you get the option to create your audience exactly how you want. This includes demographics like age, location, interests and more. When you define such an audience the chances of your conversions increase.

As per a research done on GrabOn, an Indian based coupons marketplace that started in 2013, the sales were doubled in merely 2 months duration with targeted marketing. Here are the details of the strategy they followed.

1. Acute targeting as per behaviour
2. Specific timely promotions
3. A/B tests

#2 Increases the eyeballs towards your content

Organic growth is practically diminished by Facebook a couple or years ago, and Instagram promotes your content only to those who actively interact with your profile. Thus, someone needs to like your page or take regular actions on your profile to see your content on their feed. Thus, the channels have sponsored posts as a major medium of promotion.

As per Statista.com, the number of Sponsored posts have increased with almost 5 million in 2020 since the last 4 years. This clearly states that paid promotions are the ‘tomorrow’. And thus, more and more platforms like TikTok, Skype and whatnot have started paid channels on their apps where users can create ads, set a budget and get leads/ brand awareness etc. Many local apps also have started including paid marketing in their offerings.

#3 Gets leads for your business 

Lead forms templates are already available inside various ad platforms like Faceook Business and Instagram Ads. Or you can create a separate landing page and attach it to the ad that has some information about the campaign and a highlighted CTA. This saves time and efforts as compared to cold calling, or sourcing thousands of websites. Mostly the data depends upon the type of audience you have created. Thus, it is crucial to spend more time brainstorming the audience that you need for your business.

#4 Increases video viewership

Created an awesome explainer video for your business? Now it’s time to get the eyeballs on it. Simply create a Video ad  and you can promote your video before related videos in YouTube. You need to be using a Google Ads account for YouTube ads. It’s not about the views, rather it is about the number of people the video reaches that counts. Every potential viewer is a potential customer. 

#5 Multiplies your brand awareness

Any image or video that you circulate increases the chances of your customer remembering you more the next time. When you re-target your ads, the brand recall value increases and that reflects in how well your potential customer uses your service in the future. This also comes handy while re-targeting the audience. Audience go through phases of customer journey and you must remind them about you once or twice before they make the purchase. 

So clearly paid marketing is really big, and thus it would mean that many businesses are also using the tactic to grow in their space. Where not all will get the most of it, those who follow the right approach and strategy will surely be able to make of targeted ads. 

How to get started with your first ad campaign?

1. Defining your audience: The first point to ponder upon is who are your potential customers. Thus depends on several factors, the 3 main ones being the age, their location, and their interests. Other aspects of the audience that you can consider are their education background, their jobs, the income level, and marital status. You can also target them by the school they go to or have shown interest in. Other ways to narrow down your audience is by creating a lookalike audience from one which you already have created to test out audiences. Use A/B tests to identify what works for your ad. 

Another important aspect you need to remember in your ad is the copy and the creative itself.

2. Defining your budget: There are multiple options to choose from while creating an ad. You can either choose to pay only when someone clicks on your ad, or when someone takes an action like filling a lead form. The cost per click or cost per impressions mode of ads only charge you every time a user clicks on your ad or after the ad is visible a certain number of times to your audience.
3. Objective: You need to let the ad platform know what to optimize your ad for. Are you trying to gain more leads, get your content reached to as many people as possible or you simply need to redirect your audience to a landing page? You can also have your CTA as ‘send a message’ and if it’s a platform like Facebook, the user can directly access the Facebook messenger and also may be able to converse with a chatbot. This process increases the quality of leads you get. You can define these objectives and more from the ad creation page. Every platform like Google And Facebook has a list of objectives and sub-objectives that you can choose from.
4. Duration of the Ad: Now that you have the knowledge of what type of an ad you want, the next important thing is to set a start and end date for the ad. You can create ads that start and end the same day or after months. There is no limit, but usually it might take up to a few hours for your ad to start giving your results after you publish it. 
5. Publish:  Once you publish your first ad, your work is done. Simply be patient and check back in a few hours. If you find that your ad simply wouldn’t perform, you can get in touch with the ads company either through the Help center on the platform itself, or directly by calling them (Google Ads) to see if you’ve made an error or you could optimized the ad for better performance. And once it starts giving you the results you need it is only the time to club the information with your sales strategy and get your new client or the customer on board.

Final Thought

The market is saturating with businesses for reselling and delivery both, and customers have more and more options to choose from for buying something as small as a glue stick. Thus, businesses need to leverage each opportunity they can find out there – free or paid! Targeted ads can perform with no minimum budgets. So you don’t have to be spending hundreds of dollars right in the beginning. Optimize the Ads with your best inputs, so you have an idea in the future about what works for you.

About the Author

Aamer Hussain is a content marketing professional who creates and runs content platforms and ad strategies. He’s tried and gained from paid campaigns. Google Ads is a prime strategy for the work that he does for his clients and he couldn’t stop raving about the value that lies in there. He is also a food lover and loves visiting places that are still in their pure form.