With the new year right around the corner, it’s high time to start finalizing your marketing strategy, budget, media mix, and creative messaging. If you’re looking to get a little creative with your upcoming campaigns (and hopefully unlock more attention and better results in the process), you’ve come to the right place. Here are four unique campaign targeting features to check out in 2023.
Weather Targeting
Run an ice cream shop? Sell cold weather gear? Manage a ski resort? If your business depends on weather conditions and temperatures, weather targeting is a campaign optimization tool you don’t want to miss out.
Essentially, this type of campaign targeting involves turning on and off your campaign when certain weather conditions are met. For example, you could use weather targeting to run your ad when the temperature is above a certain threshold or when it’s raining. This way, you can ensure your ads run only when they’re most relevant to people in a targeted area — and save money on wasted impressions that won’t convert. (After all, most people aren’t likely to buy umbrellas if it’s bright and sunny or flip-flops when it’s cold and snowy.)
Life Events Targeting
Targeting by general demographics, such as age and gender, is a must for any campaign, but sometimes you want to segment a more specific audience with deeper commonalities — and that’s where life events targeting comes in handy. Life events, such as getting married, graduating from college, buying a house, or having kids, are momentous milestones that warrant special, potentially even once-in-a-lifetime, purchases.
People who have recently (or will soon) experience a life event are more likely to buy items associated with that event, such as newborn essentials, bridesmaid gifts, or graduation gowns. Even if you’re selling life event-adjacent items, such as event rentals, home cleaning supplies, or affordable business attire, targeting based on life events can help you reach new customers unfamiliar with your brand.
Affinity Targeting
Beyond using demographics, behaviors, and life events to target audiences, consider adding affinity to your list. This campaign targeting strategy allows you to group people who share a set of values or qualities — you can think of affinity audiences almost like buyer personas.
Affinity audiences are perfect for brands that want to appeal to potential customers with similar political beliefs, priorities, or interests. For example, if you sell tickets to the newest Broadway musical, your affinity audience might contain both shoppers who love musicals as well as those interested in keeping up with new events in town. Targeting an affinity audience with both qualities, rather than only one, increases the likelihood that your ads successfully grab their attention.
Lookalike Audience Targeting
If you’ve already nailed down your campaign targeting strategy, you can amplify your results by leveraging lookalike audiences, which targets more people who resemble your existing customers. Lookalike audiences are built with machine learning algorithms, which analyze your customer’s data (including their shopping behavior, demographics, geographical location, affinity, and more) to find other customers with similar characteristics.
By ensuring your budget goes toward attracting, engaging, and converting the most relevant shoppers, lookalike audiences are fantastic for boosting ROI.
Turbocharge Your Campaign Targeting in 2023
Regardless of what types of media your campaign includes, using these campaign targeting strategies can significantly increase its effectiveness — as long as you know how to properly set it up, optimize it, and manage it, that is.
Here’s where a trusted media partner like Power Marketing can be a game-changer: our 25-year-plus expertise in media buying, investment in the latest media technologies, and 300+ data partnerships all ensure each campaign reaches the right people at the right place and time. Learn more here.
