Audience targeting can help you identify who your ideal customers are and help you create relevant and resonant marketing messages.

Few things are sadder than wasted potential -- and that applies to both people and products. If you build a great product or service and can't get it in front of the right audiences, your odds of realizing its potential are slim. This is one reason why audience targeting is so critically important.

Audience targeting 101

The practice of audience targeting is straightforward: You take a large customer segment and break it down into smaller groups in order to target likely buyers within these groups.

The animating principle of audience segmentation is this: General messages sent to large undifferentiated audiences don't resonate the same way that specific messages sent to highly targeted audiences do.

In other words, why waste your time selling your product or service to people who aren't interested? Instead, find the people who are interested and send them messages custom-designed to appeal to their wants, needs and interests.

Audience segmentation comes in four general types:

• Geographic: The state, city, neighborhood etc. where your audience lives.

• Behavioral: This evaluates spending habits, brand interactions etc.

• Demographics: Includes age, gender, marital status, income level, education level etc.

• Psychographic: Personality, beliefs, values, interests etc.

By considering these four factors, brands can begin to develop highly tailored audience segments and deliver customized marketing messages. This allows brands to speak directly to consumers, creating specific messages for specific audiences. This creates higher-quality leads, more loyal customers, and differentiates your brand from others.

Smart strategies for audience targeting

In order to get maximum value from your audience targeting efforts, it's important to lay the groundwork by following some tried and true segmentation strategies. Some of the most impactful strategies include the following:

• Begin with buyer personas. The buyer persona is the foundational document for targeting purposes. These personas are descriptions of your ideal customers (some businesses may have two or three, others up to a dozen). These personas are constructed from market research, internal data, demographic data, and other sources. Once a brand has well-defined buyer personas in place, the process of targeting specific audiences becomes viable.

• Use an identity graph. Such graphs are powerful algorithmic tools for identifying who your highest-spending customers are and where you can reach them. By analyzing mobile advertising IDs and email address data, brands can gain deep insight into what potential customers are searching for along with their purchasing behavior.

• Use Facebook and other social platforms for custom targeting. It's not the most complex approach, but Facebook has more information on our interests than any other organization. It's no stretch to say Facebook knows most of its users better than they know themselves. Brands can use Facebook's backend to set up demographic, behavioral and psychographic profiles that target the right audiences.

• AI-assisted chatbots. With the right design and programming, a chatbot can significantly improve UX and glean critical targeting data from site or app visitors. This data can be used to determine whether visitors fall within target markets. Marketing messages can then be tailored according to this segmentation.

Locating the ideal audience insights agency

Audience targeting has long been a critical part of advertising and marketing, but today's digital tools are making the job easier than ever before. At Bigeye we have the domain expertise and technological resources to help you find the right audience and serve them with the perfect messages.