It's no secret that the most relevant characteristic of the quality of advertising is its thematic. Roughly speaking, we are talking about the correspondence of materials that call for the purchase of a particular product and service with the interests of the people to whom they are shown. For example, you need to advertise fishing nets where you can meet fishermen. The tool with which you can achieve the maximum match between the interests of the client and the advertiser is called targeting.
Targeted advertising is…
The name "targeted advertising" comes from the English word target, which translates as "goal". It turns out that such advertising can be safely called targeted, since it is intended exclusively for the audience that is interested in showing the ad and in receiving the advertised product or service.
How this interest manifests itself can be seen from our example with fishermen. If a person really needs to buy a fishing rod, he will certainly respond to such an advertisement and, most likely, even make a purchase if the offer is really worth it.
According to statisticssales, which is carried out by almost all companies in any business area, you can see that targeted advertising is the most effective sales channel. It can only be cooler than rumors and personal recommendations of regular customers to their friends and acquaintances. Therefore, in fact, this way of promoting a product is most appreciated.
Where is this type of advertising used?
In fact, the scope of this type of advertising - an unlimited number. You can start, for example, by placing ads with the services of a lawyer near the courthouse (as the most vague targeting) and end with contextual advertising on the Internet, which is shown on thematic sites (where materials are selected that the user will see up to his browser version). You can see examples of targeting everywhere, and, in fact, almost everywhere this format of promotion and dialogue with the client can be confidently called the most effective.
Yes, this is not the easiest way to convey information to the client - targeted advertising. The cost of promoting products in this way significantly exceeds the prices for wide-reach advertising services - one that appeals to many segments of the population, representatives of age and social groups at once (traditional billboards placed throughout the city can serve as a striking example). However, as already noted, sales statistics justify the costs that go to such a promotion format.
Targeted advertising on social networks
Relatively recently (over the past 5-7 years) online advertising has become extremely popular, and with it social media targeting. Naturally, the pioneer in this area was Facebook, which showed how narrowly an advertiser can set the boundaries of the audience that will see his materials. Setting up targeted advertising on social networks allows you to clearly define user groups, taking into account their age, gender, place of residence, and even personal interests. For example, you could show your ad to people who read a particular author, are in a sports game group, or like to watch a particular genre of movies. Agree, with the set of such characteristics that social networks have for each user, the possibilities of ad targeting are simply unlimited.
A little bit about targeting options
In order to understand how accurate such advertising can be, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with an example. This way you will clearly understand that targeted advertising is the real key to the success of advertisers.
Let's imagine that you need to increase the sales of a bookstore located in a particular city. You only need to create a beautiful landing page for receiving orders and set up an advertising campaign on the network where you would like to try to work (let it be Facebook). So, it is enough to compose the title and text of the ad, select a picture, and then indicate a specific group of people:these should be residents of your city (this is obvious), as well as lovers of reading (for sure, these are those who have "Books" in their interests). So the circle of your audience will be significantly narrowed down to a few hundred people, but the campaign broadcast in this way will ideally fit the definition of “targeted advertising”. This is a great way to get the right amount of traffic that is most interested in your store. If, after a certain period of time, you see that there are too few people who clicked on the ad, you can expand the audience by adding additional interests, such as Reading tags and others.
Targeting tools
There are many ways to gather the necessary audience. In fact, part of success lies in approaching the promotion of a product or service in the right way. A set of targeting criteria, combined with an ad title and description, can have the best effect in terms of generating a significant number of sales and, as a result, high profits.
In addition to the already specified age, gender and interests, people who will see your ad can be selected according to other criteria. For example, this is the family status in which a person resides at the current moment; the educational institution in which he studied or is currently located; place of work or service in the army; the native language of the person. In addition to these and other nuances, it should also be added that an ad can be compiled based on a set of certain categories, and notone indicator. For example, you can fine-tune your campaign so that your ad is shown not only to 20-year-olds, but to people aged 20 to 25. Advertising settings in social networks are, in fact, quite flexible, which is undoubtedly a huge plus of the latter as platforms for promotion.
How to start your campaign?
Do you think that in order to start advertising on Facebook, you need to sign contracts and apply to advertising agencies? But no! A huge advantage of this and other similar sites (Vkontakte, Mamba and many others) is that it is very easy to start working on them as an advertiser! It is enough to have a registered account in this network and spend half an hour to figure everything out.
Let's put it in a nutshell. First you need to create a campaign, name it, specify the main parameters (time and frequency of its launch, budget, category). Next, you need to create ads that will be broadcast as part of this campaign. The next step is the procedure when targeted advertising is set up (this means that the criteria discussed above are specified). You do not need any special knowledge to conduct advertising activities on social networks. It is enough to have work experience, as well as general ideas about how this or that social network works with its partners. Both can be learned through direct experimentation. By the way, you can start with small amounts - for $100 you can test several tactics for displaying ads at once and identify some patterns. Notforget to analyze the statistics while doing this.
Collecting response information
In general, speaking of statistics in advertising campaigns on social networks, they should be called the most important component. Why, you ask? The fact is that it is on the basis of statistics that an advertiser can improve the model by which he builds his advertising campaign. Only with the help of specific numbers that indicate sales, the number of clicks on an advertising link, the percentage of conversions (the ratio of people who visited the product page and those who made a purchase), as well as other parameters, can make an ad successful. The rest is up to experimentation. You can, for example, create dozens of ads, collect statistics about them, identify the most successful ones and remove those that turned out to be failures. Actually, such a simple strategy is the most effective, although it undoubtedly requires certain financial investments at the experimental stage.
An alternative to social networks
Social media is a great way to promote your product. True, he works mainly for the entertainment industry and some services. Selling pumps for compressors, for example, through Facebook will not work, because this is too specialized a niche. Here contextual and targeted advertising will come to the rescue.
In fact, it can be called an alternative to social networks, since it is placed either on search engines directly in the issuance of Google or Yandex, or on sites that are connectedto the affiliate program of these advertising platforms. Let's say some parts catalog puts ads from Google Adsense, and you order ads and use the Adwords platform to manage this campaign by advertising your store.
The difference with social networks is “obvious”. If there is targeted advertising - these are the interests, age, gender and other characteristics of a particular person, then in the case of the "context" the link is made to the queries that the person makes in the search engine. For example, if he drives in the phrase “buy spare parts for viburnum”, an ad will appear in the search results with a link to a store with spare parts for Lada Kalina. This presentation of information, of course, is also narrowly focused and effective in terms of sales.
So, targeted advertising is a real mechanism for promoting goods and services. This is a rejection of the model of offering our services to the widest possible audience, which has been familiar to us since the old days (remember the anecdote with the announcement “I’m selling a garage” on the air of Field of Miracles). In fact, advertising should be as targeted as possible, it should be conveyed exclusively to those who may be interested in it. Therefore, the most accessible tool that can now provide targeting at a sufficient level is the Internet. And of course, targeted advertising itself is an excellent channel for organizing sales of your goods and services. The main thing is to know how to use it.
