New customers, past customers and your competitor's customers. Each of these customer types could be eligible to see your ads, but each of them must be handled differently in order to overcome their objections and win them over. In this post, I'll show you how to reach the right customers on Google AdWords effectively.

Customer Targets

1. New Customers
2. Repeat Customers
3. Competition’s Customers

1. New Customers

This is typically the bread and butter of most advertising campaigns. These customers are essential to growth, however, without the proper targeting they can eat up a marketing budget very quickly.

Strategy

Make them an offer they can’t refuse, or at least make them an offer. The digital marketing world is filled with noise, so why fit in, when you can stand out?

Targeting

New customers can be broken into 2 segments: early adopters vs. late adopters.

Early Adopters

Early adopters are important because they love trying new things, they are knowledgeable in the space and they can help generate buzz/word-of-mouth for your company.

1. Trial Offers: Allow customers to try your product for a specified time. This will give users a chance to easily see how your product or service can help them, it will also, give you great feedback about how they are actually using your product.
2. New Customer Incentives: Offering new customers a chance to take advantage of your product at discount will take some of the indecision out of the decision. For instance, offering new customers a 10% discount for the 1st month of service or free expedited shipping.

Late Adopters

Late adopters, I would argue, are the most important type of customer. They are very research oriented, and hard to persuade. However, when they do adopt, they typically will adopt the latest version of your product and they are very loyal having done their research.

1. Free Downloads or Whitepaper: Allowing them to have access to content that cannot be found on the website. This can be done simply allowing them to put in simple contact information, like an email address, that way you can still track the lead and gain data on how many convert or not.
2. Webinar Sign-up & Demos: Letting them understand what your product can do and how it can help them will guide them along in their decision making.

Campaign Structure

Campaign structure for new customers should be very tight initially. You want to focus on the core of your business, so if you are are an IT company that only provides solutions only to businesses than, your keywords, ad text, and site should reflect this. Steer away from broad terms in the beginning because you want to know how your high value keywords (keywords that are more likely to convert)  are going to act in the marketplace in the beginning.

2. Repeat Customers

New customers are great for buzz, repeat customers are great for stability, they can contribute anywhere from 25% - 40% of your revenue. The idea is to get your current customers to consume more and become early adopters of new products or features your company provides.

Strategy

Give them the opportunity to be first at trying something and reward them for their contributions.

1. Remarketing : Targeting customers that have purchased and giving them a new offer to try a new product or service. This is probably one the best ways to do this because you know exactly who your targets are and you can tailor your messages just to them.
2. Remarketing List For Search Ads : This is relatively new but a great way to get back in front of current customers. This targets the customer on the Search Network. It also allows you to broaden your keyword list because your audience is already qualified.

3. Competitors’ Customers

These customers are the hardest to get, but very valuable because you have taken revenue from your competitor and put that into your business.

Strategy

To target these customers effectively you really have to display distinct competitive advantages, you don’t want them to “try” you, you want them to switch to you.

1. Differentiation: If you can’t beat them, join them, but look different. If you can’t beat a special, but can match it, consider saying it in a different way that a consumer could consider to have greater value (Savings vs. % off).
2. Distribution: Advertise on mediums your competition doesn’t. YouTube is a great way to show the benefits of your product.
3. Remarketing: If you're not well known, you want to seem as big as possible. You can also magnify the competitive advantages to people that know who you are already.

Takeaways

1. Offer something
2. Be different
3. Be creative, think beyond just search
4. Keep your campaigns tight at first
5. Remarket with added value

Targeting customers properly is one of the first steps to creating a successful AdWords campaign. Often times marketers only choose to explore one customer segment on one network, which is fine, if they only want a tiny piece of the pie. So if you are a hungry marketer, create a plan that will help get as much of the pie as possible.

Have other tips to help reach the right customers on AdWords? Please share in the comments below.