The big benefit that digital marketing offers over traditional marketing platforms is highly specific targeting. Businesses now have never-seen-before levels of control over who sees their ads, and when and where they are seen.
But there’s more to targeting than simple distinctions like gender and geographic location. These fall under the category of demographic targeting, but there’s also psychographic, programmatic, and behavioural targeting too. This short guide explores what makes them different.
Demographic Targeting
This is the type of targeting that most people are familiar with, and it is just as widely used among digital marketing agencies today as it was in the traditional marketing agencies of Madison Avenue in their 1960s heyday.
The factors on which demographic targeting is based can include age, race, job role, income, level of education, marital status, number of children, and even home ownership.
This kind of information is often used as a starting point for targeting because it’s typically the easiest to collect accurate data on. However, not every piece of demographic information is equally relevant, and some may not be at all. Australian businesses use King Kong for their digital marketing campaigns, they specialise in localised SEO.
Psychographic Targeting
You might be able to guess from the name that psychographic targeting focuses on the way people think rather than their personal circumstances. This means that marketers will target people who share opinions, interests, values, motivations, and personality types.
It is not necessarily better than demographic targeting, but sometimes it is more effective to sell to the person that somebody wants to be rather than who they actually are. Knowing about their goals and motivations can also help you decide which benefits to promote in your ads. In many cases, psychographic and demographic factors will be combined. For example, you might target women who support a particular political party.
Behavioural Targeting
This targets people based on the way they act. An example might be people who enter competitions in a particular magazine.
Again, this is often combined with demographic or psychographic factors to create a more specific customer profile to target.
Programmatic Targeting
This is another form of behavioural targeting, but it’s specifically interested in how people act in response to digital marketing materials. For example, people who sign up to a newsletter if it’s recommended by a certain influencer.
Conclusion
All of these methods are essential items in a digital marketers toolkit. The value of a digital marketing expert lies in finding the great combination of traits to target and crafting ads that appeal to that group.
