Ensuring that you have a hyper-targeted audience, built with verified data, that you reach low in the funnel is what we’re all after. You want to make sure that the people that you’re reaching are actually interested and/or absorbing what you’re presenting to them. If you’re standing in front of a crowd and all you’re hearing is a very awkward silence, it’s obvious no one is enjoying or engaging with what’s going on. The very same concept applies directly to your marketing efforts. The old adage that “you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” stands true.
A target audience is a group of consumers characterized by behavior and specific demographics, such as male bodybuilders between the ages of 18-25. These can become even more specific and granular, even going so far as to target those with certain affiliations, or within a certain zip code. Target audiences are the pillar of most businesses as they influence the decision making process for most marketing strategies. This can be anything from where to spend money on ads, to how to appeal to customers, or even what product to create next. Target audiences are used to define the consumer’s views of a business as well. Consumer’s views are a representative overview of a business’s ideal customer, usually drawn from data that makes up a target audience. Depending on what you’re marketing, your target audience might be more narrow or broader.
Of course, understanding your target audience is just as important as figuring out who they are. This information will define every marketing plan and strategy you execute. While casting a wide net is generally an ok strategy, you’ll usually get better results if you go after the target audience as directly as possible. For example, say you were to air an ad during the Super Bowl. Of course your product or advertisement will be viewed by millions of people, but only a small percentage of those people may actually be interested in it. Knowing that your target audience reads a certain publication or watches a certain show might mean that your ad will have a smaller range of viewers, but it will be seen by the right people, your target audience. Selecting the right media is essential for achieving marketing ROI from these efforts.
An in-depth example would be if you were an athletic supply vendor. Your target audience would be broad, since men, women and children all wear different athletic garments. But if you were to get into a more specific area of what you sell, maybe you would want to focus on marketing your line of high-end, performance enhancing running shoes. This would mean your target audience would become more niche; likely dedicated athletes between the ages of 20-40 who have expressed an interest in running, run marathons, or compete in long distance running events. It is important to define and segment your target audience in order to determine the creative messaging that will resonate with them, and pinpoint the channels they prefer.
Besides increasing ROI, understanding your target market allows a business to build relationships and better communication channels with clients and consumers. A business can develop a more detailed creative output that speaks to specific, or more niche targets, as well as develop lines that coincide with the interests and values of those most likely to become customers. This is especially important now when consumers expect most ads to be somewhat personalized on their search history. In fact, according to Hubspot, 80% of consumers say they are more likely to make a purchase from a business that offers personalized interactions.
Far from being a perfect science though, targeting audiences does not mean that you will hook 100% of those you advertise to. Many businesses run into issues regarding the identity data of the audiences that they are trying to target. Legacy data can often be time consuming to sort through and give a business a dated view of the audience they are trying to target. This data can also be unorganized or have errors within it. According to studies, 60% of businesses believe that an amount of their data is flawed, leading to laborious efforts gathering the data again accurately. Gartner’s research suggests that over 50% of these businesses don’t measure the annual financial cost of poor quality data, which easily leads to missed business growth opportunities and a loss of ROI. Fortunately, this can all be easily solved with Stirista APT.
Unlike other platforms that use third-party data providers to create their audiences, Stirista APT uses a proprietary automated audience profiling platform that utilizes stepwise regression which creates clusters that are most like the seed audience. Stepwise regression involves selecting independent variables in a model based on an iterative process of adding or removing variables. It compares billions of data points to create these audience segments. This allows you to learn more about your audience in real time, making it that much easier to reach them and optimize your ad spend by targeting the prospects with the highest likelihood to convert.
The variables we use in Stirista APT consist of audience clusters based on ethnicity, affluence, generation, lifestyle (marital status, gender, and if they have children), and environment (urban, suburban, town, and rural). These clusters provide visibility into the target consumers most likely to mirror the seed audience used for the profile.
This audience cluster consumer market segmentation system enables you to evaluate the best and worst audience clusters relative to the general population index. This all works by correlating the seed audiences with the traits and creating clusters with an on target multiplier of how likely a person represents the seed audience. The end results include clusters with an on target multiplier of how likely a person represents your seed audience.
It’s easy to wax poetic about the ins and outs of Stirista APT, but sometimes it’s better to show what’s actually possible through a use case. A nationally broadcast television network was looking to expand their audience while maximizing their ROAS. Stirista was able to analyze their social media followers and found over 10 million new prospects with an on target number of 4, meaning they were 4 times more likely to become a customer based on the seed than the average person.
Stirista APT provides the flexibility of viewing the audience size before creating it, and the ability to expand the audience for niche products, just to name a few. As with every Stirista product, it’s integrated with accessibility to our omnichannel systems, allowing you to run campaigns seamlessly through email, digital, and CTV/OTT saving you time and money. APT allows you to transform your business by expanding your audience in minutes, not days.
At Stirista, Identity is our Identity, and we have a simple mission: help marketers generate revenue with our identity-level data. As marketers ourselves, we know that one-size-fits-all solutions and decayed data don’t work, so we built our modular and real-time OMNA Identity Graph from the ground up to arm you with marketing data that actually works.
