27 Jul Paid Media and How to Leverage Target Audiences:
Leveraging social media is often presented as a way to increase brand awareness and engagement for free. Marketers seeking strong results understand the importance of paid media. Social media allows you to have an immense reach at a low cost. By utilizing paid social media advertising, you can reach an audience beyond your followers. Paid media enables marketers to get specific with targeting, allowing companies to reach consumers that will have a genuine interest in their brand.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest offer extensive targeting options. Selecting the best target audience will maximize the value of your ad spend.
Start by targeting your ad based on location, age, gender, and language. Then, you can dive into more detailed targeting options such as:
- Demographics: Allows you to filter for nine demographic categories such as education, ethnic affinity, generation, household composition, life events, parenting, politics, relationship, and work.
- Interests: Breaks the many interest’s users indicate through their social media activity down into broad categories like business and industry, entertainment, family and relationships, fitness and wellness, food and drink, hobbies and activities, shopping and fashion, sports and outdoors, and technology. Each of these has multiple subcategories, so you can drill down quite deep in your targeting.
- Behaviors: Allows you to filter users based on their behaviors on that specific social media platform and information gathered from partners.
- Keywords: Allows you to choose words or phrases relevant to your product or service so your ads appear when customers use those terms to search. By creating a highly relevant keyword list, you increase your chances to show your ads to the most interested customers.
Facebook and Instagram allows marketers to target or exclude people who already have a connection with your page and even goes a step further to target those people’s friends. Platforms like Facebook and Pinterest also lets you create a custom audience by uploading a list of email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs, or app user IDs. You can then use lookalike audiences to find other people on Facebook that are similar to that audience.
Paid media servers as an essential extension of media campaigns and exposes your content to a larger audience. Understanding your targets and the best platforms to reach them will maximize ad reach and performance.
