Short answer: your targeting. It’s probably off and you’re throwing money out the window. Little angry? You should be, but don’t worry too much. At the end of the day, at least people had eyes on your ad and your business – that’s a good thing to takeaway from this. The bad outweighs the good, sadly, but call it a learning experience or else you’re going to pour over every single ad you’ve ever created and look at the targeting just so you can come back to this article and yell at the screen how we’re wrong. But it’s a safe bet that we’re right.
Targeting is tough, there’s no doubt about that. If you didn’t properly target your customers, you can’t feel too bad about it. People who have studied it for years still have trouble from time to time. Targeting isn’t determining a demographic and then barraging them with ads about your products or services that they might be interested in. You need to factor in multiple demographics and speak directly to them with a perfectly curated message. You cannot appeal to everyone all of the time, so while you may think it’s a great idea to cast a wide net and target as many people as possible within massive demographics, you’re wasting money.
A good way to narrow down your targeting is to choose a pain point in your customer that you can solve. If you’re a legal firm specializing in family law, you want to pinpoint who your target customer is and appeal to them. Is it a 45 year old male just outside of a major city? How would you speak to him? Create your ad and target it to him and those like him so that you can help them through whatever they may be going through, likely a divorce. If you’re a gym owner, target trendy people in their 20s who go out a lot and worry about how they appear to the world so you can help them be the best versions of themselves. Could you have targeted anyone 18-65 years old for your gym? Absolutely. But don’t you think you should speak to an 18 year old differently about working out than you would a 60 year old? Narrow down to who they are and what they might be going through and you’ll be in much better shape than yelling into the digital void.
All of it sounds counterintuitive, right? Why would you want to narrow your search to niche markets when you can try to appeal to everyone? It’s simply because in a digital age, information is flying at – and right past – people’s faces by the second. We’ve become so good at filtering out information we don’t need that if a service or business doesn’t apply or appeal directly to us? It’s like passing a billboard at 80 while you’re looking for the next song to listen to on the radio. They weren’t even paying attention to what it could have been because it didn’t immediately grab them and apply to their daily lives.
A good set of demographics to target are income levels. Determine where on the financial spectrum your customers sit and focus your ads in their direction. You don’t want to sell luxury services to someone who can’t afford them. They may know who you are and dream about your business, but they won’t become a converted customer for a long time.
Lastly, craft messages that speak to those audiences. Run multiple ads to target multiple different customer profiles so that you can give the impression of having a 1-on-1 conversation with them. People today want to know they can trust a brand or business; you have to develop and earn that trust, and speaking to your customer directly and honestly is a great start.
Does this sound like a lot? Well, this is the condensed version. There is a lot more that goes into targeting ads that you need to know about. Contact our marketing office in El Segundo, CA to speak with marketers who know how to deliver results. We boost engagement and clicks on Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads so your business can flourish. Drop us a line to learn what tricks we have up our sleeve to help you target customers properly for improved results.