Targeted Audiences: The Four Types
In the world of advertising, targeted audiences play an important role in the success of a campaign. Therefore, our first step is to define a targeted audience.
Generally, a targeted audience is a group of consumers having a predisposition for an advertiser’s products or services. Further, the predisposition can take on many characteristics. These include demographic data, tastes, and preferences.
Remember, the more targeted the audience, the better aligned the marketing message. As a result, it will have a greater impact on a marketing campaign.
Don’t forget, the bottom line of advertising and marketing is to increase sales. To learn more, click here.
Particularly, there are four main types of targeting:
- Demographic
- Psychographic
- Geographic
- Behavioral
Demographic
Demographic audiences focus on physical traits like age, gender, income, occupation, family status, etc.
For example, a fashion line. The targeted audience of the fashion line would be young females. The line would use marketing channels like Instagram and would create advertisements that appeal to young female markets.
Psychographic
Psychographic audiences target characteristics like values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. Therefore, it requires the marketer to understand the consumers emotions and values to craft influential messaging.
An example of psychographic targeting would be an online poker website discovering that a few users also enjoy watching baseball. As a result, you can create a “World Series of Poker” campaign that successfully ties the two together.
Geographic
Geographic targeting defines audiences by their physical location.
Seasonality is a good example of this. A clothing line campaign will feature warm garments in areas where it’s cold. You can feature skiing products in places that have skiing facility. Whereas, you can feature surfing lines in places where surfing is possible.
If you do not geographically target correctly, it will lead to disastrous results.
Behavioral
Behavioral targeting uses prospect’s activities to define which advertisements or marketing messages will resonate with the audience.
Currently, behavioral targeting is the most useful for ecommerce businesses. It uses web user information to strengthen advertising campaigns and creates a full user profile. Moreover, consumer behavior consists of the following parameters:
- Spending
- Browsing
- Content Type
- Time Spent on Site
- Shopping Cart Value
Hence, cross indexing and recording user behaviors can help understand what the audience wants, avoids, and purchases.
For example, an email a prospect receives depending on customer interaction or action. These actions include subscribing or adding an item to cart. First party data is the strongest and most desirable indicators for purchasing metrics and marketing development.
In Summary
Indeed, geofencing builds a very targeted audience. Physically visiting a location is the strongest indicator of buying intent.
Therefore, a good place to start with targeting audiences is your friendly neighborhood geofencing guy.
For more information, check out these videos on geofencing.