5 Types of Targeting in Marketing to Help You Reach the Right Consumers

As you delve into your programmatic advertising campaigns, you may wonder what types of targeting in marketing are most effective, and when you should use each of the different types of targeting available to you.

The best types of targeting in advertising you should leverage to grow your business through your ad campaigns depends on your industry and specific goals, however, and requires an understanding of the benefits and challenges of each.

Here are some tips to help you get started in choosing from the different types of targeting in marketing, aligning the type of targeting to your company’s goals and understanding the best types of data to use with each type of ad targeting.

Audience Targeting: Use This to Identify and Reach Key Demographics

A frequently used type of targeting in marketing, audience targeting helps brands serve ads to groups of people based on their characteristics.

Audience targeting can help you identify your key consumers at the top of the sales funnel. Useful for dividing a large audience segment into smaller groups that share common characteristics, audience targeting helps you reach customers down the sales funnel depending on your goals at each stage.

Basic audience targeting, sometimes also called demographic targeting, uses data that includes:

• Age
• Income level
• Education
• Gender
• Ethnicity

Use this type of advertising to narrow down your campaigns at the top of the funnel, and then advance into deeper segmentation for targeting and retargeting ad campaigns to foster conversions.

Behavioral Targeting: Understand Consumers’ Unique Lifestyles

Behavioral targeting can help deliver relevant, cross-device and cross-platform ad campaigns based on a user’s activities online. It is also more in-depth than contextual targeting, which serves up ads based only on the user’s immediate online environment.

With Viant, you can use behavioral targeting to dig deeper into your intended audience’s online behavior by creating ad campaigns using people-based data, which will allow you to understand consumers’ shopping habits, website interactions and product interests.

Geotargeting: Reach People at the Point-of-Sale or Based on Regions

Geotargeting, which uses geographic segmentation, can be especially helpful to reach consumers on the go. As the name suggests, it delivers relevant advertising based on a user’s specific location – from a geographic region right down to a street address.

Using this type of targeting for advertising can help for advertising seasonal merchandise; if you’re an online clothing retailer, for example, you wouldn’t want to advertise snow suits to customers in Florida. But where geotargeting really excels is in delivering the right ads to customers at or near the point-of-sale.

For instance, let’s say a mobile user was searching up lunch options for their town. As their mobile device indicates they are approaching the shopping center for your Poke bowl restaurant, for instance, you can serve up a 15% off coupon.

Contextual Targeting: Drive Consumers Down Your Sales Funnel

Contextual targeting relies entirely on the content of the websites where you’re advertising to deliver relevant ads to visitors. Some consider this an easy alternative to third-party cookies, which track users’ behavior across the web.

You can use this tactic if you want to reach a wide range of potential customers with similar interests or needs and then drive them down your sales funnel through more highly targeted ads in the future.

Retargeting: Increase Conversions and Reduce Cart Abandonment

Retargeting, sometimes also called remarketing, delivers similar, effective advertising to customers you have already reached via other means. A form of behavioral targeting, retargeting delivers programmatic advertising to consumers who have already been exposed to one of your ads.

Retargeting campaigns aid with brand awareness, but also increase conversions. Retargeting is 1,046% times more effective than other ad placement strategies, according to TrueList. It also helps reduce cart abandonment by 6.5%, TrueList says.

Deploy remarketing strategies for a cost-effective way to increase conversions through behavioral targeting and build brand recognition in a cookieless online environment.

Viant Can Help You Reach Your Audience with Multiple Types of Targeting in Advertising

Whichever tactic you choose for reaching your audience, as a people-based DSP, Viant helps you deliver the most relevant ads across multiple channels. Reach out today for a free demo and to learn more about our omnichannel DSP.