What’s the first thing you do when making new connections? Find common interests. The same applies when trying to increase your local business’s audience engagement.
It’s called interest targeting—and as a local small business owner, it should pique your interest.
Successful interest targeting relies on a specific audience’s digital data to inform ad campaigns and messaging. This will only become more relevant as consumers spend more time in the digital world. Their online habits offer unique insights into how they may engage with your local business.
Learn how to incorporate interest targeting into your marketing strategy to enhance engagement, conversions, and more—with Nextdoor.
What is interest targeting?
Small businesses use several types of targeting as part of their marketing strategies, including:
- Demographic
- Geographic
- Placement/platform
Interest targeting is different—it offers more subjective, personal insight into your target audience’s behaviors and preferences, which comes in handy when crafting ad campaigns. Interest targeting adds another layer of personalization to your audience’s ad experience, including what they see, where they see it, and how you call them to action.
Benefits of interest targeting
When you target your audience’s interests, you can:
- Push more personally relevant ads
- Boost audience engagement
- Increase conversion rates and sales
- Reduce marketing costs and maximize your return on investment (ROI)
Interest targeting benefits both you and your audience: you improve your marketing performance and sales, while your neighbors discover products and services you know they’ll love.
How interest targeting works
Before you can target your audience’s interests, you need to find out what their interests are.
Discover your audience’s interests by collecting data on factors such as:
- Browsing history
- Social media activity
- Past purchases
To collect this data, you can use cookies, a piece of technology that allows you to track and enhance the experience of users who visit your website. You can also employ Google Analytics and social media analytic tools to track and break down your audience’s online behaviors and interests.
Once you have enough data, you can design relevant, interest-targeted ad campaigns that encourage your audience to take action.
Strategies for effective interest targeting
Interest targeting begins by understanding your target audience. Start broad by researching their demographics and locations, then get into the nitty-gritty of their interests, spending habits, engagement behaviors, and personal values.
With Nextdoor, this process is made simple. Just consider how real estate agent Joe Kennedy used Nextdoor to target individuals within his selling radius. To quote Joe himself, “Using Nextdoor, I can target people that reside in specific miles radius, and proactively start conversations.”
To maximize the benefits of interest targeting, incorporate these other strategies into your ad campaigns:
- Create buyer personas – A buyer persona represents members of a specific target audience in an imaginative way. They help you personalize marketing materials tailored to a hypothetical buyer, relieving the pressure to market to many unique individuals at once.
- Segment your audience by interests – Depending on your products and services, you likely cater to people with varying interests. For example, if you own a bookstore, you need to consider the diehard book lovers as well as the casual beach readers. Consider varied interests to provide each potential customer with the ads they want to see.
- Implement interest-based ads on social media platforms – Social media algorithms know a lot about their members’ interests—use this knowledge to your advantage when designing your social media marketing campaigns. Consider running targeted ads on various platforms to maximize reach for your potential customers.
Best practices for interest targeting
Consider these important factors as you begin interest targeting:
- Comply with data privacy regulations – Collecting audience data improves interest targeting, but you must always adhere to data privacy regulations. These regulations vary between states in the U.S. and abroad. In fact, only some states have them—for example, California’s stringent Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). By contrast, in the E.U., The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects all citizens from unwanted data collection via strict laws and penalties.
- Constantly refine specific audience segments – Interests don’t remain the same as other targeting options like demographics and geography. Always monitor your audience for changes in interests to continue providing them with the most relevant ads.
- Use A/B testing – Not sure which ad will perform best? Test them both with A/B testing, a tried and true marketing strategy that spans decades. Measure each ad’s performance to maximize outreach and inform future campaigns.
Lastly, stay up-to-date with interest targeting trends and tech. As the digital world constantly evolves, so must your interest targeting strategy.
Common challenges and how to overcome them
All targeting options come with unique challenges; interest targeting can be particularly sensitive. Ensure your targeting efforts’ success by following these tips:
- Protect data privacy – Ask for your audience’s permission to collect their data, both to adhere to data privacy regulations and to preserve your customers’ trust and loyalty.
- Avoid ad fatigue – Personal ads increase conversions, but you can quickly wear down your audience with an overflow of interest targeting. Use analytics and marketing automation tools to find the perfect times to show your ads to audience members, and utilize frequency capping to avoid overdelivering your ad to the same customer repeatedly.
- Find the perfect personalization balance – Most neighbors appreciate ads tailored to their needs, but don’t respond well to intrusive marketing efforts. Keep ads relevant, but don’t overstep.
Nextdoor Ads Manager: A better way to connect with your neighbors
Your ad campaign’s success depends on detailed interest targeting that reaches your target audience. Nextdoor provides the perfect platform and tools for it.
Create a free Nextdoor Business Page to interact with your neighbors and learn about their unique interests—and how you can satisfy them. Then, use Nextdoor Ads Manager for 1:1 audience engagement and powerful targeting options. They also offer specific interest targeting capabilities to help you narrow down your audiences even further based on specific topics.
Boost your interest targeting strategy with Nextdoor. Start your first ad campaign today.
Sources:
- Google. How Google Uses Cookies. https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies?hl=en-US
- Forbes. U.S. Data Privacy Protection Laws: A Comprehensive Guide. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/04/21/us-data-privacy-protection-laws-a-comprehensive-guide/
- GDPR.EU. What is GDPR, the EU’s new data protection law? https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/
- Harvard Business Review. A Refresher on A/B Testing. https://hbr.org/2017/06/a-refresher-on-ab-testing
