Companies with a limited advertising budget can’t afford to pay for marketing techniques that don’t deliver results. In fact, no organization should spend valuable cash on ineffective marketing strategies. That’s where hyper-targeting comes in. Through hyper-targeting marketing, you can zero in on the consumers most likely to purchase from your business.
What Is Hyper Targeting?
Hyper-targeting involves clearly identifying who your target audience is. This extends far beyond the basic demographics many companies use to determine their customer base. In hyper-targeting, you seek to learn everything there is to know about your clients, including the following:
- Primary demographics like age, ethnicity, income, education, and marital status
- Buying behaviors like website visits and prior purchases
- Browsing activity shared with you, like website searches or social media interests
- Device information used to interact with your website, like phones or laptops
- Their location details, including country, state, city, or region
Combining all five factors into your customer profiles allows you to take quite powerful steps with a hyper-targeting marketing strategy. You can customize your ads to form stronger connections with your audience, ultimately leading to better sales.
The Core Principles of Hyper Targeting
Unlocking growth from a hyper-targeting strategy requires some dedication. You’ll need to collect as much data as possible from your clients while ensuring that you get their permission to do so.
Your website, social media accounts, and email lists are a great way to learn more about your customers. The data you obtain is all first-party, meaning you’re not receiving it from outside sources. Instead, your customers are volunteering their information when they interact directly with you.
As you learn more about your customers, you can attract new ones with similar characteristics. You can then tailor your ads and strategies to suit people with the same profiles as your existing clients.
Techniques Used in Hyper Targeting
After learning information about your audience, you can incorporate it into hyper-targeting strategies through several methods.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is often the first step in learning more about your customers. When you incorporate a Google pixel into your website, you can collect critical information that helps you learn more about your buyers.
All the data Google collects about your website visitors is pseudonymous. This means that you won’t know the visitor’s name or phone number (unless they offer it to you). However, you will learn other information about them — like how they found your website, their general location, and what device they used to view your content.
Your Email Subscriber List
When a customer signs up to receive emails from you, they’ll provide you with several key pieces of information, including their name and email address. You’ll find that information quite useful for developing hyper-marketing strategies.
Once you have these details, you can send your customers emails from your business and monitor how they interact with you. When you know what content leads to clicks, you can customize your future communications to better align with their interests.
Social Media Ads
Social media ads, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, are great ways to learn more about your audience. When someone clicks on your ad, you’ll receive information about them that is comparable to Google Analytics.
You’ll get even more benefits if they leave a comment or make a purchase from your company. When this happens, you can check their profiles to learn more about their interests and demographics.
Paid Ads
Running paid ads is a great way to reach potential clients through a hyper-geo-targeting strategy. With paid ads, you can specify the city, state, region, or country of the people you want to view your content.
Hyper-local targeting is available through paid ads from search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Businesses with clients who live in a specific area will most likely see the benefits of hyper-local targeting.
Your Website
Another hyper-targeting tool you might not have considered is your own website. Companies that want to reach a specific local audience can create landing pages for the cities they operate in using hyper-local geo-targeting. Similarly, they can optimize all their content for people who live in particular areas.
You can further engage in hyper local targeting by signing your business up in local directories, like Google My Business or Yelp. Whenever a consumer looks for a company that provides your services or products in their area, your business will appear in their search results.
Benefits of Hyper Targeting
Hyper-targeting offers several advantages to marketers and organizations seeking sales growth:
Better Audience Segmentation
When you engage in hyper-targeting, you’ll find it much easier to segment your audience base according to the characteristics they share. Instead of relying on what you think your clients want or what demographics you believe they fit into, you’ll have actual data to support your theories.
With that data, it becomes much easier to create ads and messaging that align with your buyer personas. Instead of using blast marketing that isn’t tailored to anyone, you can customize your ads to be more relevant to your particular audience.
Personalized Messaging
When you know your audience and their pain points, you can create personalized messages that they’re more likely to identify with. For instance, you can insert personalized messaging into your:
- Emails
- Social media ads
- PPC advertisements
- Website
Targeted customers are more likely to click on these communications simply because they relate to something they identify with.
For instance, if you’re a jewelry retailer offering a sale on wedding rings, you don’t want to waste your marketing spend on children surfing the internet or couples who are already married.
Instead, you want to target engaged couples or people in long-term relationships. Ideally, they’ll be within a few miles of your store — which is where hyper-geo-targeting can also benefit you.
Advanced Data Analysis
The more data you have on your customers, the more you can use it to your advantage in your future marketing strategies. You’ll obtain more information about your clients through hyper-targeting, which you can then use for more advanced analysis like predictive analytics.
Predictive analytics is a relatively new marketing technique that incorporates machine learning and data modeling to predict future customer outcomes. When incorporated into a marketing strategy, it can yield impressive results that lead to higher customer engagement and stronger sales.
For instance, you can use predictive analytics to time your email delivery according to when a customer is most likely to check their inbox. Predictive analytics can also help you predict when a client is considering canceling their subscription to your service.
The more data you have, the easier it is to slice and dice in multiple ways that benefit your organization.
Campaign Optimization
Hyper-targeting can yield an impressive ROI on your marketing spend simply because you’re not wasting money on advertising techniques that reach people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. When you hyper-target potential clients, you can almost guarantee they’ll be interested in what you have to offer.
Even if they don’t immediately make a purchase, you’ll stay top of mind for their future needs. This is especially true if you continue to engage them through other means, like social media or email.
If your marketing campaigns are optimized for hyper-targeting, you’ll see higher conversions, more engagement with your social media profiles, and a more devoted following. Your website visitors won’t be people who happen to stumble across your site arbitrarily: they’ll be part of your genuine target audience.
Furthermore, hyper-targeting offers another campaign optimization tool that you can’t find through other marketing strategies — retargeting. Retargeting occurs when you pick up a client’s information in some way and use it to show them ads for your business in a separate space, like a search engine or other website.
Retargeting improves brand awareness by showing customers multiple mentions of your brand. This makes them more likely to recall it than they would if they only visited your website once. Retargeting can encourage customers to resume the purchasing process, particularly if they spend some time browsing what you have to offer.
Hyper Targeting Is the Key to Effective Marketing Strategies
Clearly, hyper-targeting offers many benefits, and companies that strategically implement it into their marketing strategies will see results. The more you know about your customer base, the easier it becomes to create messaging that resonates and encourages them to purchase with you. In turn, you’ll see a higher ROI for the money you spend on advertising.