Targeted advertising means: "the ability to divide the target audience we're directing advertising at, based on certain predefined characteristics aligned with their interests, always seeking to reach the buyer persona and thereby maximize campaign performance." Segmentation can take many forms, all of them combinable.
At Interaction as an advertising agency, one of our main goals when running advertising actions is to reach the right audience at the right moment. The vast majority of brands in the market — products and services — have a defined target audience they aim at, since they know that audience is more likely and willing to consume what they sell.
A segmented market is a term that comes directly from economics, like many concepts used in marketing, referring to a group of individuals within a market who share distinguishing characteristics. This segment is very uniform in needs and interests, responds similarly to stimuli, and clearly differs from other market segments. When we translate this to the digital world, and particularly to advertising and digital marketing agencies, this concept is useful for discovering where we need to aim our advertising strategy.
Every time we run digital advertising, both on Google Ads and on the different social networks, we look to create segments for our ads, targeting the sectors we know will be most relevant to our business. For example, Interaction as an advertising and digital marketing agency only offers services in Costa Rica, so ads will be set to show only in Costa Rica and not worldwide. This is a basic example of geographic segmentation. Below we'll look at more types of targeted advertising, which are far from mutually exclusive and can be combined until we reach the target audience we're after.
Types of advertising segmentation
GEOGRAPHIC
This kind of segmentation isn't limited just to countries — on the contrary, it can be segmented by provinces, departments, cities, and even on some platforms by neighborhoods within a city.
DEMOGRAPHIC
This refers to segmenting based on different characteristics like sex, age, education, work profile, marital status.
BY INTERESTS
We can target ads to people with certain preset interests. For example: categories like travel or marketing; or it can be aimed at significantly more specific categories like luxury travel or digital marketing agencies, respectively.
REMARKETING
Remarketing is a form of segmentation because we're targeting our audience only to users who have already interacted with our brand.
BY KEYWORDS
Using keywords, and especially negative keywords, is a clear form of segmentation to reach users searching for exactly what we're offering and not variations or similar products and services.
BY DAY AND TIME
This involves showing our ads on specific days and at specific times rather than all the time.
A few considerations to keep in mind when segmenting
Over-segmentation — We've already looked at the kinds of segmentation we can carry out and how they would work in our advertising campaigns. Just as we see how little benefit comes from not segmenting our campaigns or doing so minimally, the opposite is also negative.
If we do this — over-segmenting our campaigns by combining various factors — we may make our campaigns inefficient, because by targeting a very small market segment, our campaign might not be profitable, and we could be leaving out potential customers who fall outside the target audience.
Watch for biases about the target audience — Something to consider when segmenting is the bias we might have about the target audience we want to reach. A typical case is segmentation by sex. We may believe our product or service is relevant for a certain group, but that doesn't mean individuals from other groups can't be interested in what we offer.
Be objective about operational capacity — Finally, at Interaction, we believe it's fundamental to do targeted advertising according to our capabilities. So if we can only deliver a certain service or sell a certain product efficiently in a specific location, there's no need to advertise across the entire country. Likewise, if we can only respond to inquiries on certain days at certain hours, it may be better to limit our advertising campaigns to those moments rather than running them 24/7.
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