Audience Targeting Tricks to Enhance your Association’s Marketing

Looking for your association’s marketing messages to hit the mark each and every time? With a proper audience targeting technique, your association can look no further. Being able to pinpoint your association’s audience will make member engagement and recruitment a breeze.

‍If you have the knowledge and technology to accurately send your marketing materials towards an audience that is most likely to join as a member, the success of your association’s future membership is bound to increase year over year. But if you’re not entirely familiar with the tips, tricks, and tactics of successful audience targeting, you could be missing out on prime opportunities to attract new members.

‍Recognizing your association’s target audience and pinpointing where to find them in the marketing world is an invaluable skill that you don’t want to ignore. So, let’s dive deep into how your association can use audience targeting to enhance its marketing strategy.

Audience targeting: How does it work

With all of this talk about audience targeting, it’s probably a good idea for your association to get more acquainted with what it is, why it’s important, and how it works. Audience targeting is an identification system that uses filtering techniques in order to tap into a key audience for companies and organizations.

‍The more detail and information provided, the better chance your association has at cracking the code on its audience’s location in order to market smarter. So, now that we know a little bit more about audience targeting, let’s break down a few ways targeting can work. As mentioned before, audience targeting works by seeking out different information to help determine what audience receives your association’s advertisements and promotions. That being said, there are many different categories of information that can be used to find that select audience. Things like demographics, interests, online behavior, and much more can actually tell your association a lot about a person- including whether or not they’d be perfect for your membership.

Audience targeting is a great tactic when it works, but why is it so great exactly? To start, audience targeting can save your association a lot of time, frustration, and resources. If you can create an audience based on targeting information easily found online, you can cut out the process of having your association's marketing team scour the internet for the best web marketing solution. It can also bring in better results than a traditional marketing technique.

For example, if your association is just promoting marketing materials with no particular audience to target, you could be reaching a broad audience that has zero interest and/or need for your benefits. But by targeting your audience ahead of time, you already know that the people you’re reaching with your marketing materials are interested in what you have to offer. Let’s take a look at a few ways your association can get started down the audience targeting path, as well as some online tools to help make the process quick and easy.

Start small

When it comes to audience targeting, it’s best to not dive head first into a technique you’re unfamiliar with.Your association can start by learning and focusing on the basics of audience retargeting. Try one audience targeting campaign at a time before you jump into tackling multiple targeting campaigns in order to get your bearings on the technique it takes. For example, maybe your association would like to do some experimenting with different marketing messages, and want to also try out an audience targeting tool to do so. A great place to start with trying new audience targeting tactics is by using a platform your association is already familiar with- like Facebook.

‍Facebook’s advertising targeting options make audience targeting a breeze- even for the most least tech-savvy association. It’s a great way to get your foot in the door with targeted ads, and Facebook takes you every step of the way as it targets audiences for you based on the information you select. Facebook gives your association options, from selecting an audience manually based on key information and characteristics, to uploading a contact list and creating a custom audience (think about your association’s email list). You can even create something known as a Lookalike Audience - which takes your current audience and, using smart technology, creates an audience with similar interests and characteristics. Tools like Facebook’s advertising targeting can help your association get a crash course in audience targeting before you want to get into more advanced options.

Retarget audiences by using CRM

Has your association ever encountered prospective audiences that just missed the mark? Or what about members that lost touch and ended their membership? Retargeting these Customer Relationship Management (CRM) audiences is a way to reach out to audiences that you’ve either already had a relationship with or that you’ve targeted in the past, but haven’t gotten on board with your association. Whether your association wants to retarget these people, or if you want to leave that bridge burned is entirely up to you. However, it’s important to weigh the value of targeting these CRM audiences for your association. But how do you do this?

For CRM audiences, your association needs to analyze the chance of retargeting audiences becoming members in the long run. If your association is one that doesn’t feel the need to win back its lost members, retargeting audiences may not be the marketing route for you. However, if you’re looking to cover all of your bases and recover any audience members lost along the way, retargeting is the move for you.

Allow room for flexibility

When creating your target audiences, it’s always important to keep information in the forefront of what you do. However, even the most precise target audience should allow some room for flexibility.

What does this mean? Well, think about your association's membership. While all of your members share common interests and characteristics, one member is not exactly the same as another. In fact, there are many different types of people that make up a membership, so you don’t want to close the door when inviting any of them in. Don’t segment off your association’s audience targeting entirely. While it’s important to get down to granular information in order to find the audience that’s best suited for your association, you also want to leave doors open for outliers that could have an interest in becoming a member. To do this, create overlapping audience segments that allow you to cover all of your association’s bases. You can create audiences that allow you to tweak and manage characteristics and information tracked, this way changing up who you target and allowing for more audience members to come through your marketing funnel.

‍However, be sure to also use this granular information that you track to target the best audience members. Having a precise targeting approach will allow you to test out different marketing materials on the audience best suited for your association before you reach out to audience members that are less-likely to become a member. Audience targeting can take your association’s marketing approach from lackluster to precise, accurate, and successful if gone about the proper way. Allow these tips to help your association target audiences better and create more marketing success in the long run.