I learn new things all the time about how to improve our ad campaigns here at AdStage . This week, I thought I'd share a quick tip that will help beginning advertisers improve ad targeting:

Focus on the intent of your audience, rather than the audience themselves.

Many of the users currently beta testing the AdStage Platform are small online businesses. For any business, it can be difficult to understand exactly how to reach customers. First, you have to be aware of your target customer. Assuming you know your audience, you still have to reach that audience most effectively. This is where the importance of targeting on different channels comes into play.

Social

The biggest social networks online like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all let you target and reach different audiences. For Facebook, one of the best ways to target an audience is through broad categories and precise interests.

Try to understand a few interests that would make people interested in your product. For instance, if you sell a basketball related product (jerseys, shoes, tickets, etc.), it's not effective to only target say, males under 30. There are lots of guys under 30 that don't like basketball. You would have more success using interests like: a particular sports team, top athletes in basketball like Lebron James, and other related interests. A similar approach works on LinkedIn, where you can use skills and groups for targeting.

Once you've added relevant characteristics to your targeting for each network, no matter the age or gender of the user, there's a higher probability that they'll see your ad and find it relevant. Try different variations of targeting: skills, interests, and other characteristics on Facebook and LinkedIn to learn what works best for your campaigns.

Search

Effective search advertising relies on bidding on good keywords. There's no way around it. Your ads have to display when someone is looking for the solution your company provides. Using the same example from above, try targeting people checking sport scores, or looking up an athlete or well known sports brand.

Products and services solve problems and provide benefits for customers. For a lot of online businesses, whether a customer is male or female, 20 years old or 50 years old, you're still solving the same problem and offering the same benefit (of course there are exceptions to this). Narrow down and use targeting options specific to each network to reach the audience that needs help with the problem you solve. That will help make your ad campaigns much more effective.

Come check out our private beta at https://www.adstage.io . We bring everything into one place to help you build, deploy, and manage cross-channel campaigns easily and effectively.

Thanks for reading!