In today’s high-priced advertising world, few companies can afford to cast marketing dollars to the wind and hope they end up where their target demographic resides.
Well-spent marketing money is a powerful resource to attract potential customers who will actually take that extra step to purchase your product or service.
On the other hand, randomly advertising to the masses in the vague hope that your target audience will see and respond to your call to action is borderline foolish, considering the demographic targeting tools that are available today.
Why Random Advertising is No Longer Effective
In the days of Madison Avenue advertising firms, the masses read the same magazines for the most part, and watched a very limited number of television shows from three major networks.
In addition a large percentage of the population road public transportation such as trains and buses. Chances were good that a company’s target demographic would naturally get exposed to an ad campaign on a daily or weekly basis.
Now however, things have changed.
Magazines have become specialized and categorized. There are periodicals for men, women, children, expectant mothers, parents, home handymen, dog lovers, cat lovers, sewing enthusiasts; the list goes on and on.
The choices of television stations have reached into the hundreds. No one station has a captive audience.
And with the development of suburbs, most Americans are sitting in their cars, not sitting at train stations or keeping bus benches warm.
In a nutshell, the marketing audience has dispersed and everyone has gone their own way. If companies want to reach their potential customers, they need to follow them home.
Why Demographic Target Marketing Works
Demographic target marketing works by defining a company’s potential customer. Often this is fine-tuned down to creating buyer personas – descriptions that often are as detailed as a character background in a television drama.
Next, the marketing firm determines where this specific buyer can be found.
What Facebook pages do they hang out on? What websites do they browse? Where do they shop, and how much money do they spend on an average purchase?
Finally, ads are created and placed exactly where this target buyer is. As the following article looks at, this is the power of detailed demographic targeting.
A company’s ads can be specially designed and built to appeal to a very specific audience, and then placed exactly where and even when, that buyer persona is going to be there to view the ad.
If everything works according to plan – and with demographic targeting it usually does – the buyer will click on the ad and either make a purchase immediately, or will come back to buy later.
With such powerful resources and tools available, it no longer makes sense for companies to randomly advertise to the general public.
If any percentage of that random public isn’t in the market for your product or service, that money is wasted. Why not make every penny of your marketing budget work for you?
About the Author: Kate Supino writes extensively about marketing matters and best business practices.
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