The Key Targeting Methods of 2020

Digital channels are more interconnected than ever—giving digital marketers more access to new customer audiences every month. Between highly relevant messages powered by automation and custom-tailored purchasing options, it isn’t difficult to see why today’s biggest brands are thriving in the world of data.In 2020, 61 percent of marketers consider SEO to be a vital ingredient of their digital marketing mix—particularly when it comes to establishing an organic brand presence. More than 64 percent of these marketers actively invest in SEO, year after year—and marketers pursuing a multi-audience outreach methodology, on average, can manage to communicate across three groups.Needless to say, digital marketers looking to make a splash in the world of e-commerce, today, need to reach the shores of multiple consumer segments. While SEO is certainly one of the best tools to do so, targeted ads, newsletters, and social media marketing are just as important.

The Roots of Multi-Channel Management

The name of the game is “cross-channel targeting,” and it’s a game hard-won by even the most diligent marketers adroit in the art of audience segmentation. It’s tough to focus on conversions while balancing branded outreach methods—and even tougher when trying to increase one’s number of market entrances to craft a long-lasting multi-channel strategy.

The Best Targeting Strategies of 2020

This said each of these tasks can be capably undertaken when the right methodologies are applied. To maintain relevancy and extend your audience reach in 2020, you’ll need to adopt these targeting methodologies as well. Let’s check them out.

Method One: Marketing on Google With Display Exclusions

A Google Display Network advertising campaign remains one of the best resources a 2020 digital marketer has at his or her disposal. Even so, it’s become trickier to master. Keyword pools won’t stop expanding, as modern businesses won’t stop growing in number. As such, it’s sometimes more tactical to exclude keywords than it is to include them.It’s possible to select specific keywords, audiences, topics, interests, placements, and demographics for exclusion when setting up your Google Display ad campaign. These exclusions can trim down your campaign to an “everything essential” state—eliminating bulky inclusions that could slow your ascent to Google’s first page. Google’s exclusion options were included specifically to prevent poor ad campaign performance, too, by helping businesses filter out potentially irrelevant leads. Remember: You don’t want to target the people or keywords just because they drive high costs—as this approach tends to yield much fewer conversions.

Method Two: Make Local Search a Priority

Let’s keep out focus on Google display advertisement, for now, because it offers another key tactic you can use to enhance your audience targeting approach: local search optimization.

Location targeting is already one of the best ways to identify, and cater to, an audience—whether it’s preexisting or yet to be identified. When you first create a Google Display Network campaign, you’ll get to set up, augment and perfect your campaign’s location targeting approach.When doing this, try to double down on local targeting first. If you target your brand’s local customers, you’ll exponentiate its potential reach into its consumer-base as a whole. Not only will you benefit from visibility in Google Maps, but you’ll drive Google search results which naturally prefer local results when shoppers include “near me,” “in my area,” or “around me” search parameters.You can start refining your local search boundaries easily: Just go into your Google Display Network settings. You’ll see three targeting options, which include specific target locations, locations near your brick-and-mortar and locations your audience might search for in general.To drive better targeting results, try to only target consumers browsing for your business’s locations. In doing so, you’ll spike your brand’s local search results—greatly increasing its reach into local markets and digital consumer channels alike.

Method Three: Use Three Personas to Reach Multiple Channels

Marketing personas are common and useful, components of digital marketing—helping impactors get through to consumers portray the best aspects of their products and services. By breaking down a target market’s demographics, a digital marketer can transform any cookie-cutter targeting strategy into a highly personalized one.A new approach to persona-based marketing, however, is the use of multiple personas—each meticulously designed to influence particular markets while enabling cross-channel accessibility. In 2020, the most effective marketing approaches can span across two to three target audiences—an approach which, in the past, was incredibly difficult to pull off.It’s important to remember, of course, that the best marketing personas are well-researched in advance, powered by only the best insights one can manage to get. Here, resources like interviews, surveys, and even social media comment threads are your best friends. Some brands have even managed to implement as many as 20 separate personas—each defined by specific qualities while crossing over into adjacent audiences.To get the most out of your personas, consider spanning across the entire board of persona types, even including more fringe personas such as “negative” personas—or personas that encapsulate audiences your brand typically struggles to reach. If your brand markets designer clothing, for example, a useful negative persona could be shoppers which tend to purchase clothing only when it’s incredibly affordable.

Method Four: Use Newsletter Lists for Cold Traffic on Facebook

“Cold” traffic is comprised of consumers who aren’t aware of your brand at all. In most cases, they’ve never visited your website, and they might not have even seen your business’s products or services listed in Google.This chunk of consumers is difficult to reach, but it’s possible to locate and market to them if you implement the informational resources garnered via your last newsletter campaign. If you successfully target these consumers, you’ll greatly increase your brand’s awareness—as well as its recognition.To get started, connect with Facebook’s Business page. This is probably the platform’s easiest marketing access point to enter—as it has very few barriers, if any, to extrapolate consumer information from. Get a roundabout snapshot of the demographics your brand is most likely to have an impact on—then, take some time in figuring out the audiences adjacent to this group.The real magic takes form in the implementation of your recent newsletter campaign. Take a look at the recipients of your last email outreach. You can upload these addresses to Facebook in the form of a marketing Customer List. Then, you can compare your list’s demographics to Facebook’s provided Data Mapping services.This results in a Lookalike Audience snapshot—one which you can further refine by comparing it to your previously examined adjacent markets. This little trick tends to be incredibly effective, yet it’s a trick commonly overlooked by Facebook marketers who focus more on the “main road” of social media marketing—rather than its side roads which often reveal lucrative cross-channel targeting opportunities.

Method Five: Avoid Wide-Net Retargeting

Every successful targeting tactic has a built-in retargeting method to revise previous approaches. Target markets shift, consumer trends change and shoppers find new brands to buy from. These situations occur naturally. Eventually, you’ll need to retarget—but you’ll need to avoid an age-old approach, as it’s become a little rusted around the edges: retargeting every branded website visitor.If you simply target this audience, you’ll risk diluting your overall marketing message. If one visitor bounced after browsing a single page of your site, for example, you’ll waste valuable resources in targeting them while also targeting visitors who’ve seen the same page, engaged a lead-magnet form and even checked out your product prices before ultimately leaving.You can start by narrowing down your retargeting pool to reach out to the latter group—as the insights gleaned from doing so will be much more relevant. Next, try retargeting your consumers with highly specific display ads—such as those which present only one of your products. Specific discounts are never a bad display option, either.

Using Big Data on Small Targets

While casting a large net can spell trouble in your retargeting approach, it doesn’t mean you can’t apply big data metrics when you’re trying to identify new target markets in general. Many yet-to-be-discovered audiences simply don’t know about your product—despite being some of your brand’s most active followers.Big data persists as one of the best communicative resources in the modern marketer’s arsenal, as it can both highlight currently unidentified audiences while providing information about up-to-date trends. The state of today’s marketing environments is certainly a healthy one, and even small startups can set up camp in a single channel to survey potential leads across the field.So, which market will you hunker down in first? As most sightseeing decision-makers will tell you The view makes all the difference.