Reaching the right audience with a marketing message is always a part of the strategy, and in today’s digital media landscape, it’s easier than ever to focus your messages at the right place and right time to connect with the right people.
Outside the digital arena targeting your message was a bit of a scattershot affair. When placing a billboard traffic volume is key, but you can only know so much about who makes up that traffic.
Print media campaigns offer a bit more targeting. First, focusing on publications your audience receive and read can narrow the audience. But it’s impossible to know how many of the people receiving that issue noticed your ad. To increase that possibility, ads are often intentionally paired with related content. Still, the effectiveness of these placements can be difficult to measure.
Now with online marketing gaining more importance all the time, this process of getting your message in the right place at the right time is easier and more cost-effective than ever. Online marketing offers an almost limitless menu of strategies to get your marketing in front of the right audience. Because digital targeting can be achieved on so many levels, it’s no longer about reaching the largest number of people as much as it is about connecting with a smaller number of people who are actually your prospects.
When it comes to doing this online, the largest number of business follow audience target practices that—much like early online publishing efforts—transfer a print strategy and style to the online world. In this case, research from Forbes found 79 percent of companies work with publishers to target their marketing efforts to relevant content.
A still robust 73 percent work with publishers to target audience segments. This is something that can be done to great effect online. When a digital publisher is able to provide detailed data about its audience and then to group them into segments it possible to send regionalized emails or even to place your ads in a way that they are only served to a segment of the site’s audience.
These techniques are great, but the interconnectedness of the digital landscape makes it possible for marketers to reach beyond a single site with their campaigns. Online ad networks can offer similar opportunities to target your marketing campaigns toward content or audience segments, but these networks mean your marketing collateral is served to people on a range of different websites. While some of these sites might not specifically cater to dental professionals, if there’s content or an audience segment that matches the profile of your prospects, an ad network can help you connect.
However, the digital media targeting landscape can be even more efficiently mined for the right audience for your message with the help of automated marketing tools. Learning to use these services is a hurdle for some, and just 54% of businesses are using them to automatically place ads around relevant content, with just 45% using them to target content to audience segments. While these new technologies won’t be for everyone, the companies that master them can be very nimble and focused on their marketing campaigns.
When it comes to the challenges of reaching the right audience via digital marketing, 54 percent of businesses says the biggest challenge is identifying the right target personas for their campaigns, and a further 29 percent say the biggest challenge is a lack of available target info from media partners. Just 3 percent cited the scale of the audience to be targeted as the main challenge. This shows that people understand the notion that the bigger audience doesn’t always equal the better audience, but finding out who that better audience is and where to reach them remains a struggle.
To overcome these challenges, it makes sense to work with media partners that know their audience and know how to get your messaging in front of those people. Your media partners should know not only who their audience is, but also why their audience is there.
At Dentalcompare we know our audience is in a dental product research mode because 80 percent of site visits originate from an organic search. These dental professionals are asking questions, and by targeting your ads around the content they access during the search, your messaging can be right alongside the answers they find.
It’s not just about advertisements either. The dynamic intersected nature of content on a site such as Dentalcompare provides opportunities to place custom content, topical events and even basic lead capture forms in the paths of this targeted audience.
These marketing efforts, when done correctly, should yield more impressive results. While your ad reach will be smaller, the percentage of people engaging should be much higher with a targeted effort, and in some cases, the total number of people engaging with your content can even be larger.
Even better, this audience you reach should be providing higher quality leads because the audience is already engaged on the topic. Instead of a wide-ranging scattershot approach that brings in unqualified leads, targeted digital marketing efforts will bring in leads primed to convert at a higher rate.
All of this adds up to more effective marketing, but the benefits don’t just stop with improved results because a targeted digital campaign should be less expensive to run when compared to a print-based strategy. In many cases targeted digital marketing is available with performance-based pricing, so you only pay for the people who encounter your campaign, or in some cases, follow through with your call to action.
In effect, using audience targeting with digital marketing means you’ll reach fewer people, but those people will be more tuned in to receive your messaging, and you’ll be able to reach these prime prospects at a lower cost.
To find out how Dentalcompare can help you connect with the right parts of our audience for your business contact us as [email protected].