What is targeted advertising in simple terms?

Development and promotion of your own business by placing advertisements on the network is the most efficient way, but this might be a quite costly approach. If the campaign budget is limited, targeting advertising will be an optimally suitable tool that allows to use financial resources rationally and achieve a planned result quickly.

What is targeting?

The term itself has an English origin and translates as a “goal”. The main point of the concept focuses on the efforts to promote goods to a specific target audience. To achieve this goal, marketers are conducting a study that identifies who might be interested in this product or service. Therefore, to determine what targeting is, it must proceed on the consumer’s needs, values or preferences.

What is targeted advertising?

Social networking is the most appropriate platform for the convenient and efficient selection of the target audience. First of all, this tool must be realized. Nowadays Instagram and Facebook are two leaders in Ukraine, therefore every professional web studio that is engaged in product promotion via the Internet focuses on them.

In general, targeting advertising is advertisements that are mainly posted on the social networking sites and are shown only to the users who are highly interested in a particular product or service. Target audience can be sorted by one or more signs like gender, age, region of residence, marital status, interests, hobbies, activities, national or religious belonging, etc.

How does targeted advertising work?

When logging on the social network site, the user enters personal data. During visiting this site you can join certain groups or communities and show interest in the content of various themes. It allows robots to collect and analyze information about users adding them to extensive databases. This work has been carried out even before social networks have found out what targeted advertising is. 

Later, marketers realized that such extensive databases oriented on the potential consumers can be used to achieve the product promotion target. The principle of the advertising campaign is to combine several targeting, which makes it possible to get a narrow segment of the target audience that will be definitely interested in the offer.

What is the difference from contextual advertising?

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  Placement. The context is displayed in search results, as well as on the search engine of partners’ sites. Google AdWords service is used for configuration. Target is localized in social networks.

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  Operating principle. Displaying contextual advertisements depends on the content of the request, which the user enters into the search boxes. Targeting advertising in Instagram or Facebook is displayed to all potential customers who correspond to the target audience.

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  Type of consumer. The context works with a “warm” target audience, i.e. with people who have already shown interest in a specific product. Target focuses on “cold” clients, who are only potentially interested in the offer.

Who will be interested in targeting advertising via social networks?

Before ordering targeted advertising, it should figure out whether this tool is appropriate for the purposes of a particular business. However, in modern society, where social networks take the lion’s share of people’s free time, it becomes universal. Therefore, this can be effectively used both by bloggers who have already known what targeted advertising means for instagram, and by large corporations:

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  online stores;

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  networks of catering establishment;

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  coaches, coaches in various directions from fitness to personal growth;

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  sports centers;

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  tour operators;

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  places of entertainment sphere, etc.

Advantages and disadvantages

Main advantages:

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  Coverage only target, i.e. interested audience is possible on the correct configuration.

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  Ability to respond quickly to the changing needs of users. Tracking indicators by which targeted advertising is essesed can be identified that such an impact loses its effectiveness and quickly correct any segment of the target audience or the method of filling the advertisement.

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  Easy to implement. A successful campaign can be organized, even without a promoted group with a large number of subscribers.

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  Personalization offer. This tool allows you to speak in one language with potential customers and guarantees to attract their attention.

Disadvantages:

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  Relatively low conversion. Social networks are often taken as a place for communication and entertainment, and not for viewing ads;

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  The difficulty with moderation. Each platform raises special requirements for text, clip art, etc.

Outcome

In response to the question what targeted advertising means it is important to understand that this is a highly specialized tool that affects the consumer in social networks and used in a targeted way. Such a focus allows using financial resources and marketers’ efforts rationally.