Digital Targeted Marketing 101

It seems like everywhere I go, people are interested in talking about digital targeted marketing, so I thought we’d do a blog about it. So here it is, Digital Marketing 101.

So the first question is what is digital marketing?

Digital targeted marketing is basically using the internet to specifically target people that you identify in your audience.

  • How old are they?
  • Where do they live?
  • What are their interests?
  • What’s their household income?
  • Do they own a house? Do they own a car?

We can break all that down and get very specific on who sees the message you’re delivering.

Another part of this is what’s the message? That’s really important as well. Depending on how old your target audience is, certain messages will resonate with certain people and that’s another big part of digital marketing.

Let’s talk about the platforms that we can advertise to.

We can send your message to Google or YouTube, to Pandora, Spotify, even Amazon allows you to advertise to their proprietary audience. But we can also do banner ads, OTT, or streaming television. We can send messages to Wi-Fi enabled devices within your target audience, whether that is demographic, geographic, or psychographic, we can hit that target just exactly the way you want to.

One of my favorite things to say, even though I don’t really like to use this as a slogan is, if you can tell us who and where, we’ll take it from there. In other words, identify your audience. Where do they live? How old are they? If you need help defining those parameters, we can certainly work with you on that as well. This is very important to do because that dictates which platform we’ll use in order to hit the most people in your target audience.

Let’s talk about costs.

So if you wanted to run a typical radio or TV, maybe newspaper campaign, or if you wanted to buy a billboard somewhere along Interstate Five, you’re talking at probably about a $1,500 bill per month. That’s really sort of a beginning budget for any of these platforms that I just mentioned.

Well, what we like to do is to take your audience and decide on the platform that would be best and then take that $1,000 to $1,500 a month and deliver impressions and clicks to you from the audiences that you desire to hit the most.

Let’s run through some examples.

First of all, talking about how old, the audiences that you’re trying to hit. We break age down into demographics like this; 17 and under, 18 to 24, 25 to 45, 46 to 64 years of age and 65+. So once you know which audience you’re trying to get to, then we can choose the platform that will work best.

Now it’s true that some platforms are going to work across the board, no matter how old your target audience is. For instance, display ads or banner ads go to wi-fi devices. OTT streaming television, we can get into any of those categories. Amazon allows you to even search and go out and send messages to people, based on how they search when they’re shopping on Amazon. And then you have Google and social media platforms as well. Those basically cover all the age groups, no matter what.

But what if you’re trying to get to an 18 to 24 year old audience? Well, one of the best ways to do that is through YouTube. 18 to 24 year olds and probably as old as 35, tend to sit and just watch YouTube video after YouTube video. We can put ads in between the videos and even sometimes mid roll. They hate it, but they can’t get away from it, so you can get that impression in front of that audience. So, I would say 18 that even as old as 35 might be a good spot for you to be running YouTube ads.

Streaming radio also tends to go toward a younger audience; Spotify and Pandora. Now, there are certainly older people that listen to those two platforms, but it tends to react best with a younger set, so that’s kind of how we look at things. If you get a little bit older, broadcast television, print media are a couple of ways that you can get to an older audience quite easily and Facebook ads as well, seem to really attract that 65 year old plus, especially female audience.

The problem is these days, there are so many limitations that Facebook, Google and YouTube have gotten kind of picky about the kinds of advertising they allow to happen on their platforms, so we do sometimes have to get a little bit creative.

So we’ve hit a whole bunch of stuff here.

We’ve run through what digital targeted marketing is, what the different platforms are, how to define your audience, get an idea of the cost so you know going in just about what it costs to run any of these campaigns and then a couple of examples there as well. We do this all day, every day, and we love digital targeted marketing. We are the local experts in digital targeted marketing and BP Media Solutions and it’s because we have access to all of these different platforms.

One more note on digital targeted marketing. You can get away with a smaller budget and some of these numbers I threw around earlier. You could probably get into some of these at about $250 a month in your budget. But remember, if you’re going to do this, you’ve got to be strong. You have to come in with a budget that you can commit to for six months or a year and just know that’s the cost of doing that kind of advertisement.

Maybe my FAVORITE thing about this type of advertising too, is the analytics that you get back. The data that comes back and the reports, will tell you which piece of advertising did better. You will know you make an adjustment to your parameters if it works or not. These things are real time. They are live, when we talk about reports and at the end of the day, you can look at those and make adjustments based on what’s working.

So digital targeted marketing is a thing. That train has arrived in Douglas County. You can get on it and if you want to know more, you just have to reach out to us at BP Media Solutions. Visit gobpmedia.com or send an email to bp@gobpmedia.com.

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About the Author Brian Prawitz, owner of BP Media Solutions.

Brian’s passion for customer service led to the creation and launch of BP Media Solutions in May of 2015. “Going the extra mile, providing face-to-face accountability, and exceeding goals are all things I live for.” Brian spent 25 years in radio as an award-winning news and sports announcer in Seattle, Missoula, Montana, and Roseburg, Oregon. He spent 18 months in the Marketing Department at Seven Feathers Casino Resort before BP Media Solutions was born.

Brian and his wife Jannie were empty nesters for about three months before welcoming all three of their grown daughters and one son-in-law home from various colleges in 2020. They love camping, theater, Disneyland, and (Brian loves) golf.

To connect with Brian: bp@gobpmedia.com

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