Have you decided that native ads are the right move for your marketing campaign? Great! For many advertisers, native advertising is seen as an effective way to reach an audience without intruding on their browsing experience. Now, it’s time for the next step: targeting an audience in advertising. Many companies seem to struggle with this task, especially when it comes to native ads, as they differ from conventional advertisements.
But here’s the thing: ads that target a specific audience are always more effective, no matter what kind they are. However, if you want to navigate narrowing down to a target market for your native ads campaign, we’re here to help!
Is Targeting an Audience in Advertising Important?
The short answer is yes. Native ads are a unique form of advertising — and are different from their conventional counterparts — because they are organically inserted into the user’s browsing experience. So, in this case, targeting an audience in advertising is necessary to deliver the best experience to the people who are most likely to be engaged.
To illustrate, let’s say that this very page has native ads. Would you be more interested in a native ad about home remedies or mobile-first advertising? Chances are the message about home remedies will catch you off-guard, whereas you’ll find the one about mobile-first ads relevant to the surrounding content. Without targeting an audience in advertising, you’ll find that unrelated content will be seen as an unwanted distraction!
Understanding Your Market When Targeting an Audience in Advertising
Knowing where and who the target audience is plays an important role in your advertising success. So, if you want to hit the bull’s eye as you proceed with targeting an audience in advertising, you’ll find the information in this subsection useful. As you’ll discover, targeting an audience in advertising isn’t just knowing who this viewer is. You should intimately know the people you’re trying to reach to provide a highly personalized ad experience.
Defining Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the people you want to focus your campaign on. So, to be able to accurately define them to create target audience ads, you should first have a clear campaign goal. Use these guidelines while defining and targeting an audience in advertising:
- Ensure that the definitions are clear;
- Gather both qualitative and quantitative data for market research;
- Look at how your competitors approached defining the audience;
- Be open to updating the definitions as necessary;
- Respect and protect user privacy as you perform your research.
Identifying Audience Characteristics and Behaviors
Are you trying to find out how to target an audience in native ads? If yes, then, you definitely need to learn as much as you can about your viewers. Once you have a general profile, it’s time to dig deeper using the data that you’ve just obtained. For targeting an audience in advertising, ask yourself the following questions. These should help you determine the characteristics and behaviors of your target audience.
- What are their attitudes toward the content of your native ad?
- How often do they perform certain tasks?
- What do they enjoy doing in their free time?
- How do they feel about their work?
- Are they naturally skeptical, or are they more open to ideas?
Utilizing Demographic and Psychographic Data
To be successful in targeting an audience in advertising, you have to be able to make sense of the information you gathered when creating your native ads. The demographic data should help you make every ad feel more personal.
For example, if the majority of your target audience didn’t go to college, your efforts shouldn’t make references to the sense of pride that goes with obtaining a college degree. Meanwhile, knowing about their hopes, dreams, fears and concerns will allow you to create more effective audience-based advertising. Psychographic data helps you foster a deeper connection with your audience by saying out loud what they’re already thinking. It’s up to you to be able to connect it with what you offer.
Targeting an Audience in Advertising with Native Ads: Everything You Need to Know to Run a Successful Campaign
Knowing your audience is already half the battle. So, if you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! You’re well on your way to running a successful campaign. You can now come up with various versions of a native ad if you want. But to be a true expert in targeting an audience in advertising, try out the strategies we recommend in the following subsections.
Segmentation Strategies for Native Ads
When targeting an audience in advertising, there are no hard and fast rules on how to segment your viewership. However, we recommend segmenting based on the following strategies.
- Geographic information: If your market resides in various parts of the world, you may want to create different ads to better relate to local culture.
- Demographic information: This is an important perspective to have when targeting an audience in advertising. Because what resonates with a 30-year-old woman who works in marketing is different from what would appeal to an 18-year-old college student taking marketing classes.
- Psychographic information: If you see that your audience has different interests or opinions, targeting an audience in advertising can be further segmented this way.
Ad Content Relevance and Engagement
We invite you to go back to the results of your past campaigns, as this is a treasure trove of information that you can use for targeting an audience in advertising. Here, you will learn how the audience responded (or did not respond) to various versions of your native ad. Or if you only ran one strategy, then look at the audience that you did not capture. This is an effective way of targeting an audience in advertising because you’re guaranteed to have an ad for everyone.
Utilizing Data Analytics for Targeted Advertising
Data analytics is a growing field that has high applicability in various tasks, including targeting an audience in advertising. If you have run native ad campaigns before, it can be useful to revisit and explore the data. You can use the insights to find new market segments, see which ads audiences respond to and more. Using data analytics can vastly improve the success you get from targeting an audience in advertising. It helps prevent biases in your decision making while also ensuring that you don’t miss out on any valuable insights that can boost campaign results.
Contextual Targeting vs. Targeting an Audience in Advertising: What’s the Difference?
Audience targeting is what we have described in this text so far. Essentially, it involves narrowing down a population to a subset that’s most likely to be interested in what your brand has to offer. However, targeting an audience in advertising isn’t the only way to go. Another option is contextual targeting, which displays an ad based on the contents and keywords of the page. Advertising according to the audience targeted can also be based on semantics, which means using the actual page content to determine which ads will be shown. Therefore, if your native ad is about shoes, it will appear on pages of the same topic.
How Does MGID Implement Native Targeting?
As a native advertising platform, MGID ensures that your ad reaches audiences who are more likely to become your customers. We have made this possible thanks to the various filtering options and other technologies incorporated into our platform. With these, you can make targeting an audience in advertising easier and filter based on:
- Geo;
- Operating system;
- Browser;
- Browser language;
- Mobile connection;
- Phone price range;
- Audience.
However, we’ve gone beyond just targeting an audience in advertising. We also use contextual targeting to ensure that ads don’t disrupt users’ browsing experience.
Future Trends in Targeting an Audience in Advertising
Over the years, we have seen a lot of developments in how advertisers are allowed to display their ads. Although, as the digital world evolves, the rules for targeting an audience in advertising can change very quickly. We know that this can be intimidating because it can mean dismissing everything you thought you knew about the field. However, one thing will always be true: expertly created advertisements target audience segments who are more likely to respond. Even with these future trends, there will still be strategies to do just that.
Cookieless Advertising
Cookies are small pieces of text embedded in your browser to gather information about you. For a long time, cookies were the backbone of targeting an audience in advertising, but with restrictions in many jurisdictions on their use, highly personalized advertising based on cookie targeting may not be possible in the near future. Even though the use of cookies will not change in certain areas, it still means that advertisers will have to rely on them less. One piece of research recommends future-proofing the way your ads target audience members. Instead of relying on various metrics, you should develop a deeper understanding of your market through surveys and interviews.
More Prevalent Use of Artificial Intelligence
According to the 2023 Markets and Markets report, targeting an audience in advertising using AI will grow by 36.8% by 2030. This means the sector will have a trillion-dollar revenue by then! Artificial intelligence is expected to revolutionize not only advertising but also practically every other industry today. We believe that this will be the biggest thing since the internet, quickly propelling itself into mainstream use. So, expect the job of targeting an audience in advertising to be much easier in the future. You will still have to verify the targeting decisions that AI makes, but you won’t have to start from scratch with every campaign.
FAQs on Targeting an Audience in Advertising with Native Ads
What is native advertising, and why is audience targeting important in this context?
Native advertising is a type of advertising that follows the format that you see on a website. Targeting an audience in advertising is as important here as it is with banner ads because you want to expose users to content that will resonate with them. This means more efficient spending of ad dollars.
How does targeting an audience in advertising native ads work?
For this, you usually use native ad platforms like MGID, which help you target your audience using the information that you’ve obtained about them.
What are the key factors to consider when crafting native advertising based on the target audience?
When creating your ad material, you want to consider these factors:
- Demographics;
- Audience expectations;
- Location;
- Knowledge and attitude to the topic;
- Self-image.
Can you provide examples of successfully targeting an audience in advertising native ads?
We have a Case Studies page dedicated to sharing the success of our native advertising platform. These case studies show our results for many multinational companies when targeting an audience in advertising. These include Domino’s, Ubisoft and HSBC.
How does data-driven audience targeting in advertising contribute to the effectiveness of campaigns?
Making decisions using data is always recommended because:
- It helps you gain better customer insights;
- Data-based audience targeting in advertising can improve the overall customer experience;
- It increases your potential ROI as well as the overall performance of the campaign.
Are there common mistakes to avoid if you want to try targeting an audience in advertising using native ads?
If you want to run successful native ad campaigns, we recommend avoiding these mistakes:
- Casting too wide a net when defining your audience;
- Targeting an audience in advertising with no purchasing power;
- Not taking into account the psychographic profile of your viewers;
- Making the segments too small;
- Not looking at how the competition is approaching audience targeting.
What tools or platforms can assist in the optimization of native adverts when targeting an audience in advertising?
We are very confident that the powerful tools and technologies on MGID’s platform are enough to help you target your audience. We use AI to connect users to content and products most relevant to them.
Conclusion: Targeting an Audience in Advertising Is Essential
Contextual advertising plays a big role in ensuring that you can mask the ad as regular content on the site. However, this doesn’t mean that you can neglect targeting an audience in advertising altogether. Enjoy the best of both worlds by registering on the MGID platform to gain access to a personal manager, a team of expert creatives, a wide network of high-quality publishers and all the tools you need for targeting an audience in advertising. With our help, your native ads campaign will be a success!
