Targeting your Internet Marketing

Google, Facebook, and others are making it easy to reach your target market by allowing you to select specific demographic information about your customers.

Google was one of the first search engines to introduce regional targeted advertising – allowing you to display ads in specific regional areas. This means that if you are a company based in Edinburgh you can restrict your advertising so that it only appears to customers in Edinburgh. Following Google’s lead, Yahoo and MSN are now allowing regional advertising for pay per click advertising campaigns.

Google has also recently introduced demographical targeting in Google AdWords. Advertisers can now go into their campaign settings and select the demographics of their target customers including the ideal age bracket and gender. This demographic filtering only works for ads appearing in the content network, not in the traditional pay per click advertising realm. However, it is only a matter of time before Google might have enough information on all of us to introduce the demographic targeting feature into all of their advertising programmes.

Facebook is certainly the leader right now for targeted advertising programmes. Advertisers can select as much information as they wish about their target market including basic information like age, sex and relationship status. However the information that interests advertisers the most in this platform is that members of specific groups can be targeted. For example, if you wanted to sell Rugby tops on Facebook you could advertise to people who belong to a Rugby supporters group.

Another excellent way to target customers is to place advertising on the websites that your customers visit. For example, if your target customers are over 65 you might consider placing advertising on Laterlife and Saga.

Online advertising is becoming increasing competitive and expensive. However, pound for pound targeted advertising should be much more effective in achieving those customer conversions and sales compared with untargeted campaigns.