The Art of Audience Targeting in Paid Social Advertising

ally-horridge

Ally Horridge

Digital Account Manager - PLMR Genesis

Paid social advertising offers an incredible opportunity to reach your audience with precision. However, effective audience targeting requires more than simply boosting posts or picking broad categories. To maximise ROI and drive meaningful engagement, you must master the art of audience segmentation and retargeting while creating personalised campaigns tailored to specific audience segments.

At PLMR, we work with a variety of sectors, including education, health and social care, travel and transport, and more. This scale of experience gives us a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities each industry presents, enabling us to craft strategies that deliver impactful results.

Understanding Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is simply dividing your audience into smaller, more specific groups based on shared characteristics. This allows you to tailor your messaging to resonate with each group, resulting in higher engagement and better performance. It also helps determine which platforms to prioritise for each audience, enabling better budget planning.

The key audience targeting parameters across social media channels include:

  1. Demographic – Age, gender, income level, education, or marital status.
  2. Geographic – Location-based targeting, such as postcode, town, county or country.
  3. Interests – Interests including groups, music, TV shows, hobbies and more.
  4. Behavioural data – Online behaviours, purchase history, and brand interactions.

Crafting Personalised Campaigns

Once you’ve determined your audience groups, it’s time to get creative with ad copy and visuals.

Understanding your target audience is key when crafting social media ads that will resonate. By considering their demographics, location, interests and behaviours, you will be able to personalise both your visuals (whether that’s still image or video) and messaging to ensure they stand out in the user feed and ultimately interact with your brand.

To ensure your ad is fully tailored to your key audiences, use language, imagery, and offers that resonate with the specific target audience. For example, if you’re targeting a younger demographic, using emojis to break up text is an effective way of increasing engagement.

Test, test and test again. Making the perfect personalised ad can be trial and error. By testing different messaging, CTA’s, video vs image and ad placements will provide you with all the data you need to fully understand the content your target audience resonates with. A/B testing is the ideal way of clearly determining which variable works best with your audience.

For instance, imagine you’re running a Meta campaign to promote applications for students to join your university. While the campaign generates a high number of impressions, you notice a low click-through rate. To address this, you decide to A/B test different ad formats: a static image versus a video showcasing other students sharing their positive experiences at your university. The results reveal that the video significantly outperforms the static image in driving clicks. This data-driven insight not only enhances the effectiveness of your current campaign but also informs future strategies, enabling you to create more engaging and impactful content.

Combining the knowledge you already have on your audience with the data you receive from ad performance will give you the perfect recipe for social media advertising.

The Power of Retargeting

Retargeting allows you to re-engage users who have already interacted with your brand but haven’t yet converted. This targeting strategy is highly effective because it targets people who are already familiar with your business. For example, you can retarget users who visited specific pages on your website, such as product pages or the pricing section, by showing ads for a product they viewed but didn’t purchase. Similarly, cart abandonment campaigns can remind users to complete their purchase.

But retargeting doesn’t stop at website users, you can also retarget people who are engaging on your social channels. By targeting engaged social users who have liked, commented or shared your content is a fantastic way of encouraging them to take further action in the customer journey.

And it doesn’t stop there either! Finally, lookalike audiences use data from your existing customers to find and target new users with similar traits, expanding your reach while maintaining relevance.

The Ideal Platforms and Their Tools for Targeting

Paid social platforms offer robust tools to help you execute effective targeting and retargeting campaigns. Of course, choosing the right platforms is dependent on your organisation’s goals and target audience. However, our go-to platforms include:

  • Meta (Facebook and Instagram): Meta’s ‘Audience Manager’ is brilliant for building custom and lookalike audiences. Its detailed targeting options are extremely effective in reaching new audiences, as well as having the capability of setting targeting boundaries as broad or as niche as you wish.
  • LinkedIn: This professional platform is ideal for B2B targeting with filters like job title, company size, and industry. Due to its highly competitive advertising space, it often returns a higher cost-per-click compared to other platforms (such as Meta).
  • Google Ads (Search, Display, Performance Max, and YouTube): Google offers a brilliant resource for varied advertising formats and places in one centralised hub. Its advanced remarketing and audience segmentation capabilities make it ideal for extensive reach.
  • TikTok: Relatively new to the advertising game, TikTok allows creative targeting options based on behaviours, interests, and trending content. Top tip – your videos should fit in perfectly with your target audiences For You Page.

Mastering audience targeting in paid social advertising can be daunting at first, but once grasped, you will reap the rewards. By segmenting your audience, crafting personalised campaigns, and leveraging retargeting strategies, you can create highly effective ads that drive engagement and conversions. Continuously analyse performance and refine your approach to stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.

If you’re not sure where you should start when it comes to beginning your social media advertising journey, contact our experts today – we’re always eager to showcase the power of audience targeting in paid social advertising!

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