Using audience-based marketing to drive impactful campaigns that convert
As a small or midsize business, you know how important it is to reach the right kind of customer. The same is true in your digital marketing campaigns. To create the most effective campaigns that engage the high-intent, high-value leads that will drive conversions, it’s critical to determine the right target audience.
Exactly what is the right target audience for your campaign? To answer that question, consider your business goals. You may want to drive awareness of your business to attract new customers, re-engage past customers, or promote new products or services. By leveraging digital advertising and audience-based marketing strategies, you can lower cost and increase conversions.
But even if you know your business goals inside and out, establishing an audience-based marketing approach can feel intimidating. The good news? You don’t have to do it alone. Follow this guide to learn more about audience-based marketing and how to build your ideal target audience with ease.
What is audience-based marketing?
Audience-based marketing is a marketing approach that allows businesses to speak directly to the most relevant customers with customized content tailored to their specific needs. This helps you drive the effectiveness of your campaigns, boosting the return on investment (ROI) of your ad spend.
Simply put, this approach narrows down the thousands of people your ads might reach to those that you want to reach. On the flip side, it also engages people who likely want to be reached by you, connecting you with warmer leads who are close to making buying decisions.
Along with potential reduced acquisition costs of up to 50 percent, embracing an audience-targeting strategy is no longer a nice-to-have, but a business imperative for small and midsize businesses.
Building the best target audience for your business
You’ve likely already thought about the characteristics of your ideal target audience in the past. Now, it’s simply a matter of formalizing those insights and applying them to your digital marketing campaigns. By understanding who you’re advertising to and what their pain points are, you will be in the best position to run engaging, high-converting campaigns that ultimately grow your business and enhance brand loyalty.
As you get more comfortable, you can refine your audience-targeting strategy but to start, begin with these three key elements:
- Audience research
- Centering customer needs
- Segmentation
Audience research
Audience research is an important early step in determining what the best target audience is for your business.
This crucial step gives you direct insight into the challenges your customers face and the features or benefits they’re looking for in a product or service. It also helps you narrow down the characteristics of someone who is ready to engage with your brand and has purchasing intent.
Some of the most accessible approaches to gathering audience research include:
- Surveys
Conducting surveys allows you to collect information about current and potential customers you otherwise may not have had. You can discover demographic information — like location, age, gender, and income — or ask directly about the pain points people experience with products or services similar to yours.
How you phrase your questions is important. If you give survey respondents the opportunity to provide short- or long-form answers to complex questions, it will be more challenging to standardize and analyze the data. That’s why, instead of asking an open-ended question like “what are you looking for in a product?”, we recommend providing multiple choice questions. This will make it easier to get a better understanding of your audience as a whole.
Surveys offer the rare opportunity to hear directly from consumers. And with so many free online survey providers available, they’re not only one of the most valuable channels of research, but one of the most accessible.
- Social media listening
While conducting surveys is an effective approach to gathering specific information, social media listening allows you to tap into the organic thoughts and feelings of your potential target audience.
A quick yet effective way to begin social media listening or social media monitoring is to search for the name of your business or the name of a competitor on a social media platform. This can reveal valuable feedback about what customers want from your business and opportunities to solve the challenges your competitor’s customers are facing.
An easy way to leverage the Nextdoor app for social media listening is by searching for your business’s name in your feed. You can see recommendations and reviews that help reveal what elements of your business your target audience values — like price, quality, and convenience.
By monitoring social media, you have a spotlight on sentiments both in your own community of followers online and in your neighborhood. This gives you a huge, unbiased sample size to look to when building your ideal audience.
Segmentation
After conducting audience research, you’ll have a good idea of the needs that your audience-targeting strategy should be addressing. Most often, your audience will include customers with a variety of needs they want your business to solve.
Instead of trying to create messaging that addresses them all, segmentation allows you to divide your audience into smaller groups with similar characteristics. This is an essential part of audience-based marketing that will help you define the most effective messaging for your campaigns. Segments can be determined by many factors, but the most common include:
- Geographic and demographic
Geographic and demographic information gives you a baseline from which you can build a broad segment. If you’re a pizza shop that delivers, you could segment your audiences by zip codes in the delivery zone and those out of it, offering each different deals. If you’re a furniture store, you may want to segment your target audience by income to more effectively market pieces in different budgets.
Another effective way to use geography is for seasonal offers. If you have a national yard services business that offers both lawn care and snow blowing, for example, you can use a neighbor’s location to determine which offers are most relevant to their environment depending on the time of year. In regions like the Northeast, you would market your lawn care service in the summer and snow blowing service in the winter, while in regions like the South, you would likely focus solely on lawn care.
Other demographics to consider include occupation, marital status, and education. Other useful geographical information you can filter by is language, especially if your business is located in a multilingual neighborhood.
Segmentation at this level works with data that is easy to categorize, making it a natural place to start. However, just because your product or service is perfect for a certain segment, the people in these segments may not have a need or desire for your product or service. That’s where behavioral and psychographic segmentation comes in.
- Behavioral and psychographic
While geographic and demographic segmentation can help you create more personalized messaging for your audience, behavioral and psychographic segmentation allows you to dig deeper and pinpoint who is more likely to become a customer, maximizing the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Behavioral traits include purchasing behavior, customer satisfaction, brand engagement, usage behavior, and anything else that has to do with how an audience member interacts with a business. You may want to create a segment of regular customers to target them with loyalty reward promos, while a segment of unsatisfied customers could be targeted with discounts, comps, and other incentives to return to your business.
Psychographic traits shed light on the mindsets that in turn influence purchasing behavior, such as values, lifestyle, personality, and interests. If you have a handmade, eco-friendly clothing brand, you can market your business to different segments of your target audience based on the different leading values they hold. For example, some may value the eco-friendly element of your brand, while others care more about avoiding mass-produced clothing. You would create ads for each of these segments, highlighting the values that matter most to them.
The more specific you can be in your segmentation, the more effective your audience based marketing campaigns will be.
Centering customer needs
Once you’ve segmented your audience into smaller groups, you’re ready to hone specific profiles to ensure you’re building effective campaigns that are customized for your audience.
Using this tactic puts your customer’s needs at the center of your campaigns and helps you address what’s most important to them. Not only does this improve your conversion rate, but it improves the customer experience as well — because nobody likes getting ads that are irrelevant to them.
The best way to personalize your campaign messaging is to create an ideal customer persona and a unique selling proposition (USP). The persona distills your segments into representative individuals you want to target, while your USP ensures that your campaign is tailored to each persona.
- Creating high-value personas
You’ve already done the hard work of segmenting your target audience, which involved taking a large amount of data and turning it into smaller, more digestible pieces. Creating an ideal customer persona will get even more specific.
Creating an ideal customer persona entails applying the defining characteristics of your audience segments to create fictionalized characters that represent those segments. In turn, you get a “real” person you can tailor your campaign messaging to.
The persona should include criteria like age, income, location, pain points, purchasing motivations, and product/service needs. You’ll need to take time to analyze what combinations of these traits will produce the ideal customer, most likely–and most ready–to make a purchase with your business.
It’s likely that you’ll need to create multiple personas, as customers will come to you with different needs and challenges. Then, to create the biggest impact, customize your campaign messaging and approach for each persona with a USP.
- Determining the right USPs for your personas
At its core, a USP is a demonstration of value and differentiation to a customer. It shows that you understand their needs and can offer them a product or service that other businesses can’t.
Let’s say you’re the pizza shop from earlier. You’ve done the research to hone in on a broad potential audience, then narrowed down your target segments, and have created “the Perfect Pizza Patron.” She lives in the neighborhood, likes to eat out, has disposable income, and is looking for new vegan options close to her. It just so happens that you’re the only pizza shop in the area that offers vegan pizzas. Targeting the Perfect Pizza Patron with ads promoting your vegan menu items would be a highly effective USP; you are fulfilling a need she has that only you can provide.
If you find that you have a few potential USPs per persona, testing and optimizing can help you pick the one that will drive more conversions. As with all marketing, don’t be afraid to experiment.
Using Nextdoor Ads Manager
With all the building blocks complete, you’re ready to launch your audience-based marketing campaigns. And Nextdoor is the perfect platform for it, with local ad personalization earning 15% higher engagement than standard national ad messaging. In fact, 72 percent of consumers say that they will only interact with personalized ads.
If you want to include location-specific personalization, which is proven to generate a higher click-through rate (CTR), insert 
in your copy, and the platform will dynamically pull in a neighbor’s city or neighborhood when they view the ad.
But that’s only one of the simple tools Nextdoor Ads Manager (NAM) provides to make it easy to reach the neighbors you value, saving you time and boosting ROI.
When you create a campaign with NAM, you have the option to define your target audience in a number of ways. For each campaign, you can create an ad group — this is where you can input your target parameters, like location, age, home ownership, income, interests, and even devices. You can create segmented messaging specific to each ad group, designed to engage and convert.
Reach potential customers locally and at scale with NAM’s:
- Customizable messaging to support your audience targeting strategy
Create specific ad groups within easily customizable campaigns that reflect your target audiences and USPs. Connect with your neighbors through location-specific personalization that enables dynamic messaging for a target audience’s city or neighborhood.
- Hyper-local, high-intent customer base that includes your intended audience
Unlike other platforms, Nextdoor only allows verified users, so you can be sure you’re reaching real neighbors with buying intent. Seventy-two percent of the 90M+ neighbors have been influenced by a business recommendation, while 94 percent value the recommendations they receive on the platform.
- User-friendly with extensive resources to help maximize ROI
Just as you want to customize your ads for different target audiences, NAM makes it easy to customize your user experience when building campaigns. With in-depth guides and how-tos, along with best practices that can help boost CTR by up to 15 percent, Nextdoor helps you execute your audience targeting strategy and maximize the ROI of your ad spend.
Already have a Nextdoor business profile? You’re minutes away from creating your first targeted ad campaign. To get started, sign up for Nextdoor Ads Manager for free.
