Every business owner wants to know how to grow their pool of customers. Digital marketing is the most effective way to get your business in front of the people who will benefit most from your products and services. It's how to find customers who want and need what you offer so that you can make a compelling case for why your brand is the best choice.
But to do that effectively, you must meet them where they spend their time and present messages customized to your target audience and optimized for their preferred platform. Tailoring ads to specific customers on their preferred platforms is a highly beneficial way of providing personalized ad experiences.
In this post, we will first discuss how you can determine where your customers spend time online. We'll then talk about how to use that knowledge to create effective display ads by catering them to your ideal customers' preferred platforms.
How To Find Customers Where They Spend Time Online
To learn more about your customers and their online habits, you must conduct audience research and set up target personas. One of the easiest ways to access this information is by leveraging owned and operated (O&O) platforms. O&O platforms like McClatchy have extensive insight into their audience that can provide valuable research and extensive analytics to help you craft the most compelling messages for your ideal audience.
So, what exactly does it mean to design ads around how customers spend their time? Examples can include:
- Behavioral targeting – This method uses demographic info and analytics to shape relevant ads. It improves your marketing effectiveness by leveraging browsing habits such as where they shopped, links they clicked, search terms used, purchases made, and more.
- Contextual advertising - This type of ad strategy creates a behavioral profile based on the potential customer’s actions on a search engine or site. The profile creates a reference when placing ads on websites relevant to your product or service.
- Retargeting ads – Have you ever noticed that after you've browsed a site or purchased something on a website, you start seeing ads for it? That is called retargeting, and it is aimed at past customers to entice them to come back to the site and make another purchase.
Effective Display Ads Should Match Customer Interests
Generating brand visibility and interest is vital in today's online world. To make your messages resonate more deeply, it's essential to always keep your customer's interests in mind when crafting your ads. The combination of the platform you use and your audience's interests will determine the most effective messaging. Personalize your ads with relevant content by considering your target customer's pain points or using humor to attract their interest and keep their attention.
Shaping Your Display Ads to Customer Interests
Let's look a little deeper into creating display ads with customers in mind. Take, for example, a home builder who wants to place their brand firmly in the minds of people looking to build now or are likely to consider building a home in the future. The builder could target hardware store websites for those DIYers who are sick of repairs and are ready to start over in a new, finished home.
Another great way to reach the home builder's target audience is with home design blogs. Maybe the customer starts out wanting to redecorate or renovate. The builder can use their homes to show what they can accomplish while making the customer consider what they could do in a new home. O&O platforms are an excellent source of insight into those target customers while offering guidance on shaping ads that resonate.
Create Compelling and Effective Display Ads
Every business owner knows that their business is only as strong as their pool of customers. That's why growing your audience and nurturing those customer relationships is vital. Digital marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach potential and existing customers today. However, it requires audience research and an understanding of their habits, interests, and motivations to achieve its potential.
If you've found yourself wondering how to find customers or how to design effective display ads for them, consider working with an established O&O platform. O&O platforms give business owners a vast store of research into existing audiences, providing a fast track to reaching their target demographic and saving them time and money.
McClatchy's O&O platform has extensive knowledge of its audience and can help you shape ads that reach your target customers and resonate deeply with them. If you want access to a deep local audience with a national reach, contact the McClatchy team today to get started.
