Introducing Micro-Targeting: 6 Ways To Enhance Your Audience Reach

Global advertising spending is on the rise. As the ecommerce sector booms in a post-Covid landscape, 46% of online businesses plan to increase their ad budget in 2023 and beyond!

It’s no secret that targeting consumers has become a competitive task in a social media-oriented playing field. With so much media to consume, online users are less likely to respond to traditional ad types based on targeting strategies that once drove mass conversions.

Moving forward, marketers must find new ways to keep their target demographics interested. From interactive social posts to individual segmentation for a hyper-personalized brand experience, consumer demands continue to evolve.

With this in mind, could we be entering a new era of micro-targeting? As brands aim to improve their personalization, reaching out to consumers individually could be the key to boosting engagement in a competitive market. In this post, we’ll talk about six things you can do today to improve your own audience reach through micro-targeting!

What is Micro-Targeting?

Micro-targeting goes one step further than traditional campaigns. Rather than addressing your target audience with a one-to-many approach, micro-targeting speaks directly to each consumer with customized content for hyper-personalized engagement.

Using a person’s previous browsing history, age, location preferences, and past purchasing record, these snippets of consumer data can help marketers divide users up into segmented target groups.

These target groups can then be approached individually with alternative social media ads, chatbots, and email campaigns that speak directly to their personal preferences. Cutting straight to the heart of what the user desires and providing a personalised solution is key to increasing audience reach and boosting campaign ROI!

Is Micro-Targeting Effective For Small Businesses?

Yes, micro-targeting is effective for businesses of all sizes, but especially for small businesses with a limited ad budget. Micro-targeting could be the difference between reaching a higher number of likely to convert consumers and seeing a blanket marketing campaign fall flat.

In 2023, 61% of online consumers demand brands create experiences for them based on their preferences and previous purchase history. Introducing micro-targeting is a great way to ensure that all target groups are happy with the ad campaigns they see across their social feeds!

Big data analytics is quickly turning into a multi-billion dollar industry, so it’s time to jump on board if you want to see your audience reach grow.

6 Steps to Enhance Your Audience Reach

With micro-targeting in mind, let’s have a closer look at some of the ways business leaders can improve their audience reach using hyper-personalization and big data analytics. 

1) Understand Your Customer Groups

One of the first things to accomplish as a micro-targeter is understanding your own consumer groups. A business is no longer made up of one demographic. Thanks to the powers of the internet, consumers now come from all locations, platforms, devices, and niches, all of which should all be considered when you enter the planning stage of a campaign.

The key here is to build a number of ‘customer personas’ based on analytic data from site engagement stats, social media interaction, trend spotting, and even location and browsing cookies. 

Once you’ve learned more about the types of consumers you’re currently attracting, it’s time to rank them in terms of profitability for your brand. Your primary source of consumers will be your largest target group, which is addressed in every advertising campaign you put out. 

Your secondary and tertiary consumer groups are also very important, as these are the leads you’ll want to work on micro-targeting. They may not be your most predictable audiences, but finding ways to enhance and personalize their experience with your business could help widen your demographic in new directions going forward!

2) Start Segmenting

Now that you’ve found your consumer groups, it’s time to start segmenting your campaigning.  We’re talking multiple ad designs and formats alongside content for a number of devices, locations, languages, and preferences. 

Using your segmented consumer groups to your advantage, start presenting different audiences with content that appeals directly to their niche/desires. 

Here’s what Chuck Cohn, founder and CEO at Nerdy, had to say about segmenting audiences:

“Analyzing each segment will also help you decide where to focus your attentions most heavily. One framework for analyzing segments is known as RFM: recency, frequency, and monetary. How recent was the segment’s last engagement or purchase with you? How frequently does the segment buy or engage with you? What is the average dollar purchase? By segmenting your customers, you may be able to identify the opportunities where you should be investing the most effort and resources into future marketing and customer retention initiatives.”

(Image Source: MarTech Series)

Trialing your segmentation strategy is a great way to test how target groups respond to your personalized content. While some groups may engage instantly, it can often take a few attempts to target secondary and tertiary audiences.

3) Retarget Existing Consumers 

When it comes to micro-targeting, it’s not just about finding new customers to connect with and convert. It may also be beneficial to go through your list of previous conversions and encourage them to keep coming back!

Defined by Sprout Social:

“Retargeting, also called remarketing, is an online advertising method of reaching out to previous visitors of your website or app, often by displaying ads or sending emails. Retargeting offers an opportunity to recapture potential leads or customers if they left your site without converting or meeting a marketing goal.”

In 2023, over half of small businesses prioritise a retargeting strategy. Not only does it cost a business less to re-convert a previous consumer than acquire a new one, but prioritizing loyal consumers can help improve brand reputation and longevity. 

(Image Source: Mail Chimp)

Retargeting can be used to promote your best-selling products or simply entice previous customers to return to your ecommerce store with personalized ad popups. 

Whether you opt for a social media-driven retargeting campaign or construct an email full of customizable offers based on a user’s previous purchase history, retargeting is a great way to speed up slow-moving sales while making repeat purchasers feel valued!

4) Build Your Own Affiliate Program

Global internet traffic is not equal. For example, if you’re selling dietary supplements to people who work out frequently, you don’t necessarily want to waste your time advertising to “car enthusiasts.”

Choosing to work with affiliates is a great way to ensure that you’re targeting an already warmed-up audience for your product promotion. 

In fact, according to Kinsta, 54% of marketing experts rank affiliate marketing within their top three channels for customer acquisition.

Affiliate marketing programs make use of influencers and opinion leaders within your target community and help guide their audience toward your product or service! Not only will they be more likely to boost your overall sales online, but affiliates also raise your brand awareness with engagement for a niche demographic.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, why not make use of an affiliate marketplace platform like ClickBank? 

As an all-in-one affiliate ecommerce platform, ClickBank will support you in launching an affiliate program from scratch and connecting you with thousands of potential affiliate partners to promote your product and grow your sales!

Learn more about how ClickBank supports brands and product owners on our Sell page or go through our Seller Resource Center!

5) Set Up Sequential Engagement Campaigns

Another way to segment your audience is based on their active engagement with your content. Thanks to the powers of Facebook and Instagram analytics, it has never been easier to gain insights into how your users interact with your social content!

For example, if you post a 10-second Instagram story, you can see how long each viewer spent watching the video. Here is where sequential engagement comes in! Using the length of time each viewer spent on your content, you can create new engagement-driven consumer groups and target them with different types of content.

For example, if one group watched 100% of the video, target them again with another long-form piece of content. If another group only stuck around for 30% of the video, try a quicker call-to-action and an image-based story ad!

(Image Source: Buffer App)

Blenders Eyewear provides a great example of sequential segmentation. Creating a number of different ad types and designs, they target consumers based on how they engage with content rather than simply guessing.

6) Optimize Your Campaigns For All Devices

Last but not least, ensure that your campaigns are optimized for all devices. Did you know that a whopping 70% of ad revenue now comes from smartphones? 

In order to target consumers effectively, you must consider every way that they might access your brand. Whether this is via mobile, laptop, tablet or even voice search, customizing content to perform well on all screen sizes is essential if you want to keep expanding your audience reach. 

(Image Source: Finances Online)

Over half of all conversions will be powered by mobile devices in 2023, so forgetting these consumers could cause significant damage to your micro-targeting campaigns!

Moving Forward

Ultimately, micro-targeting may only just be surfacing in the mainstream ecommerce scene, but it’s certainly here to stay.

More than 49% of consumers now find their perfect product or service after seeing a targeted ad. Not only does micro-targeting enhance convenience for consumers, but it can save sales reps half the time and effort when it comes to acquiring leads.

Whether you engage with micro-campaigning via social media, email, or text, this is a strategy that will only grow in popularity for businesses over the coming years!