Reaching Your Target Audience with Display Ads

Katie-Zillmer
5 min readDec 18, 2020
display banner ads

Display ads are one of the most effective tools that companies have to engage with their audience online. The key is determining the best way to do that by developing, placing, and managing your ads. If done incorrectly, your efforts may not be effective and you may not see results. Your ads need to reach the right audience, your target audience, to give you the results that you are looking for. In this article, we discuss how to reach your target audience with display ads.

Know Your Target Audience

The first step in reaching your target audience is to know your target audience. It isn’t enough to be able to describe what they look like are what they do. You need to know them in specific detail. For example, you need to know what type of phone the majority of your target audience is likely to use. That way, you can focus on developing ads that are optimized for their phones’ ecosystem. This is true of any asset that you make to reach that target audience, including apps and content for your website.

Knowing your target audience also means knowing their preferences when it comes to what they like and what influences them. Use this information to form the basis for your display ads banners and other assets. Fortunately, many search engines have tools that allow you to do target audience research.

Target the Right Location

When you are done using a display ad creator to build the ads that you need, make sure that you target the right locations with them. The right location depends on the preferences of your audience. Identify where they are most likely to appear and put your banner ads there. Doing so will maximize the chances of reaching your target audience. You may need to do this by posting on other sites besides your own, which can be done through a guest post-program.

Decide What You Want Them to Do

One of the reasons why you can’t reach a target audience is because the design of your display ads is unclear for viewers. Every display ad is designed to get viewers to do something. You want that action to be clear, which means you need to plan your ads around it. This is called the CTA (Call-to-action) and every successful ad has one.

Before you develop your ad, you need to decide what you want them to accomplish. For example, creating interactive display ads can be an effective way to hold customers’ attention while you convince them to follow the CTA. In other cases, you can use your ads to introduce new products to the market with the CTA being to click a button that takes viewers to a page with more information. It all depends on how your sales funnel works and what you need customers to do at that particular time.

Use Keywords Effectively

Keywords are one of the best ways to reach the right audience. By using keywords effectively, your content will be targeted by searches that your target audience makes. For this to work, you need to know what your audience searchers for regularly and what keywords they use. Fortunately, most of the search engines also have tools to help you figure out which keywords to use.

When you develop ads, include keywords where you can in ways that search engines can track. For example, ads with meta data, specifically alt tags, can include keywords so that search engines can track them. You may also be able to do this with HTML5 ads since the search engines can read them like a normal web page. Putting your keywords into the ad means that the ad could be served to target audiences looking for similar content. This works especially well if you can localize the keywords that you use so that they apply to people searching in a relatively close area around your business.

Remarketing

Remarketing is an effective way to prequalify viewers for the ads that they are served. It works by using the tracking tools that search engines use to choose customers for ads. If a customer has searched for a product or service before, the remarketing system can identify these customers and re-serve them ads that you made. That way, you get multiple chances to make an impression.

Since they are chosen based on their search results, those customers are already primed to find a solution for a problem. Not only does remarketing give you more than one chance at a conversion, it gives you multiple chances with customers that are already in a buying mindset. If your ads struggle with conversion rates, this may be an effective tool to help you improve that conversion rate.

Study Your Competition

One of the easiest ways to understand how to reach your target audience is to find a company that is already successful at it, and see how that company does it. Your competition is easy to monitor and you can learn alot from how it attracts customers. You may be able to adopt some of those methods for your company as well.

It is not enough to just copy what they are doing. You have to adopt it and make it your own. There are plenty of ways to do this and make the acquisition strategy a part of your business. This can be especially helpful when you are new to a market and need to acquire customers quickly. It is not uncommon for companies to study their competition to see how they can reach similar levels of success.

Build Better Ads with Ad2Cart

If you are struggling to reach your target audience, one of the first places to look for problems is in the design and quality of your ads. No matter how well you place or design your ads, poor-quality ads will always be ineffective. You may need a display ad builder to help you improve the quality of your ads. Try Ad2Cart, which gives you access to some of the best online tools for building effective display ads.

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Katie-Zillmer

Katie Zillmer is a Senior Account Manager at KitelyTech.