Today we’ll be building on our post from yesterday about demographics. Search marketing makes it so easy. You set up a campaign, pick some keywords and “voila”, you’re ready to go. Keywords are straightforward because the potential customer is literally typing the keywords they think will solve their problem. If you’ve talked to your customers you should come up with most of these no problem.
But what about display? You can target keywords, but these keywords are different. The potential customer isn’t searching for them, but instead is browsing the internet. Therefore the keywords are more like topics, imprecise and vague. If you’re an HVAC company, you might use a keyword like “heaters”, but find that pages talking about car heaters, RV heaters, pool heaters, etc. aren’t relevant.
To solve this conundrum you need to stop thinking about the what (keywords, geography, etc.) and start thinking about who.
Target The Who
This skill boils down to one basic question:
Who is your potential customer?
While this seems like a simple question, I’ve found that many clients I work with struggle to define their customer. To help yours, here are the areas you need to define:
- Age – You don’t need it to be an exact age. More like a range like 25-35 years old.
- Gender – Do men and women perform the same or are they drastically different?
- Interests/Topics – Display networks usually have a predefined set of interests. Here are Google’s topics and here are Yahoo Gemini’s.
- Other – What magazines to they read? What other websites do they visit? What movies/TV shows do they watch? What are their hobbies?
- Remarketing – We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that you should be remarketing to people who have visited your site. That’s another audience that we’ve covered.
Once you’ve defined your potential customers in these ways you can effectively target your display campaigns to reach the right people.
Catch up on the rest of our #DigIntoDisplay series right here on the Clix blog!
