Raising Brand Awareness: Which Targeting Option Is Best for Your Goal?

Although paid ads are the most promising method for getting products and services in front of paying customers in 2022, most small business owners simply don’t have money to burn in ad spend. Every ad campaign must therefore get you your money’s worth.

To do that, you need to know who you’re selling to first. This is called targeting, and it’s an essential component in promoting brand awareness. Building brand awareness is at the heart of marketing for several reasons. Higher brand awareness confers the following benefits:

• Customers see more familiar brands as more credible.
• Customers are more loyal to brands they can easily recognize.
• Customers are more willing to pay more for your products or services if your brand is popular.

Think infamous brands like Apple and Tesla. Their loyal band of followers is more than willing to shell out thousands of dollars even before they can get their hands on the actual products. This cultish brand reputation is also why lucrative imitations of these brands have sprung up everywhere. The brands practically sell themselves.

Getting to that level of brand fame starts with familiarizing yourself with audience targeting.

 

What Is Audience Targeting, and How Does It Work?

In the context of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, audience targeting is the basic process of identifying which customers will most likely interact with your ads when they see them. This process is done before an ad is created for practical reasons.

It’s simple: showing an ad about carpets to 5,000 random people can get expensive. Still, it might just be worth it when shown to 5,000 people ages 25 to 30 years, interested in apartment interiors and are already looking to buy home decors.

Knowing your audience before running your ad will help achieve the following:

• Craft an enticing ad with the right tone and copy and 
• Increase your chances of successfully taking customers to your landing page and convincing them to checkout

Audience targeting is about creating one or several customer profiles and segmenting them based on categories like interests and demographics. Getting this data is simple using a multitude of readily available tools. Once you have this data, you can start building your customer profiles.

 

How to Refine Your Targeting

After segmenting your customers, launch separate campaigns for each. Ensure that you have the right analytics tools to measure if your goals are met, whether that means conversion or page views.

Analyze the results and use that to narrow down your segments further. For example, if you’re looking at conversion within a broader age group of 20- to 60-year-olds, see which age segments actually purchased (converted) and retarget your next campaign toward that much narrower range. Repeat with the other metrics until you’re confident of your final customer profiles.

 

Which Targeting Option Is Best for Achieving Brand Awareness?

Within the Google Display Network (GDN), you can easily refine your audience targeting by leveraging the function called Affinity Audiences. Utilizing Google’s vast network of internet resources, you can find the people you’re looking for by looking at their interests and affinities.

Google’s reliability at finding the right affinity audience is bolstered by the fact that Google has a reach of over 90 percent of internet users around the globe. So it comes as no surprise when Google’s wealth of audience data is by far the most comprehensive in the game.

 

Get Specific with Affinity Targeting

As a result of this rich audience profile catalog, you can filter your targeting through several layers of affinity categories.

This means you can target not only 25- to 30-year-old DIY interior design enthusiasts but also those who are into minimalism and prefer their apartments KonMari style.

However, this specificity level is not always advisable if you want to cast your net onto a broader spectrum of potential customers. You risk alienating interests elsewhere once you get too specific.

 

Explore Custom Audiences

The Google Ads platform lets you pick up a custom audience from a long list of prebuilt affinity audiences. This list includes diverse interests from technology to lifestyle and many things outside and in between.

Still, it’s not an exhaustive list. If these prebuilt lists do not fully capture your customer base, you will benefit from creating your very own custom affinity audiences.

 

How to create your custom affinity audiences

Setting up custom affinity audiences is done manually on the Google Ads platform. Google will automatically provide you with suggestions once you enter your related keywords.

For example, if you’re looking for people planning to buy carpets, typing carpet would yield several related results that indicate interest or buying intent, like where to buy carpets near me or best carpets for a minimalist living room.

There are four criteria for creating custom affinity audiences:

1. Places
2. URLs
3. Interests
4. Apps

Apps and Places are usually the least useful. Unless you know for a fact that your target audience uses a certain app or you are only selling within a specific geographic area, then you can ignore these criteria. Instead, focus more on which pages might be of shared interest to your audience based on URLs. Under interests, simply enter relevant phrases or keywords.

To create your own custom affinity audience on Google ads, follow the steps below.

1. Log into your Google ads account.
2. In the upper right corner, click on Tools & Settings.
3. Select Audience Manager from the menu.
4. Click on the Custom Segments .tab
5. Click on the plus sign (+).
6. Give your new segment a preferred name.
7. Add the preferred interests. Simply select from the given keyword suggestions.
8. Once you’re satisfied, click on Save.

Repeat all steps until you cover all desired market segments.

A word of advice before you get blindly into it: it’s best to exercise due diligence and do your bit of research first to nail down your persona and align their interests with yours. 

If all this is not within your forte, it’s wise to hire marketing experts who know the process well, are adept with current tools, and understand the business better than anyone else. They will be able to help you run more profitable campaigns and get what you pay for without sacrificing your own precious time and resources.

 

Conclusion

When it comes to online business, raising brand awareness is one of the most critical touchpoints to find credible vendors and suppliers.

When you don’t have the luxury of a big budget, creating brand awareness is all about reaching the right audience. Getting your product in front of customers who are already interested in it and more likely to pay for it is much more likely to result in higher KPI outcomes than showing it to a random group of people. Interaction and engagement are always better than reach when building a solid brand. Positive ROI means getting the most bang for your buck.

So if you’re thinking of improving brand popularity, your best targeting option is affinity audiences. Take advantage of Google’s built-in custom audience list or tailor it to your needs by creating your own custom affinity audience segment for a more efficient targeting and cost-effective ad spend.