Decoding Your Digital Ad Strategy – Part Two
You’ve created your buyer persona and have a better understanding of your target audience and potential audience types. Now, we’ll explore what platforms offer the best opportunities to engage with your target personas and potential ad objectives.
Match your persona with business objectives
It’s time to match your persona with your business goals and objectives.
If you’re looking for exposure, you can start big with a brand awareness objective. At this stage, it’s important to get eyes on your brand and help your audience become familiar with who you are and what you can provide. If you’re pushing lead gen ads to someone who’s never heard of your brand, how likely do you think they’ll be to commit to making a purchase or giving away their information?
If your brand has already built a foundation and you’re ready to bring more users to your site, focus on an objective that drives traffic. A majority of social media platforms will allow you to optimize toward this goal, and even utilize their data sets to serve ads to users most likely to visit your site. Just make sure to monitor your cost per click ––it can get out of hand with certain audiences types and sizes.
Finally, if your persona sits soundly in the purchase phase of the funnel, consider serving ads to users most likely to convert. These are most commonly referred to as conversion or lead gen objectives on social ad platforms. It’s a great way to reach high-value potential customers or create opportunities for driving leads down the line, especially if you’re able to utilize data collection opportunities like form fills.
Best Platforms For Your Target Persona
Knowing your target persona or audience type is just the beginning. Next, you’ll need to explore how different platforms can help you reach your audiences through their unique targeting capabilities. Social media platforms all have one thing in common––networking. While many consumers use multiple social media platforms, your ideal customer may not. Based on its strengths, determine which platform will best convert your persona into an effective audience.
Let’s start with the most popular social media platform (in terms of overall users) – Facebook. With one of the most diverse sets of targeting options across social ad platforms, Facebook has many strengths for targeting broad audiences, such as the interest, demographic and behavior characteristics we mentioned previously. You can also use a wide range of custom audiences, including those from valuable Facebook sources like videos, events and shopping experiences.
LinkedIn’s accessibility with each user’s profile information makes the platform a difference-maker with targeting audiences based on their job characteristics. There are many ways to seek out potential customers through basic parameters, such as job industry, job function or years of experience. But if you have existing data for direct data points like job title and company name, you can mix and match targeting tactics to find the perfect system.
There are some unique and interesting ways to target users through social advertising. Twitter offers the option to target users similar to a specific account’s list of followers, allowing you the opportunity to target your competitors’ followers. The important thing is to explore your options and learn what types of targeting are available throughout the seemingly endless list of vendors and platforms.
Audiences & iOS 14.5
Apple’s iOS 14.5 update gives users the choice to opt-out of sharing their private information for tracking purposes, which completely changes how marketers will gather data and insights. According to Flurry Analytics, roughly 10% of daily users in the U.S. have opted in to allow apps access to their information. While Facebook targeting is now limited, this poses a great opportunity for marketers to review their metrics and evaluate how much of their ad spend is going toward targeting and re-targeting ads. If you find you’re spending a large amount, now is likely a good time to adjust your strategies.
Decoding your digital ad strategy doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right research on your potential audience along with the best engagement opportunities and potential ad objectives, you’re sure to crack the code without overspending. Let’s go get some results!
