You Might Not Know Your Audience as Well as You Think You Do

When you’ve been running ads for a while, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. You’ve figured out your marketing and you know who your customers are, how to market to them and what to expect from your campaigns.

Or, at least you think you do.

One of the secrets to long-term advertising success is to always be testing. Markets change. Algorithms update. World events happen. Your audience is constantly evolving, and if you want to get good results from your campaigns, you have to evolve with them.

Testing New Audiences

Sometimes you just don’t understand your customers as well as you think you do. We all build our marketing campaigns around a specific vision of our customers. Even if that vision is accurate, it may not encompass all of your potential customers, so it’s always worthwhile to explore additional options.

If you haven’t taken the time to really think through and build out your buyer personas, you might not actually know your customers all that well. 

To really get to know your customers, you need to regularly dive into your customer data. Analyze their behavior. Find ways to personalize your ads to their needs. Identify new potential audiences to test. There are countless ways to use your customer data to improve your advertising.

For example, one of our clients was struggling to get the purchase volume they needed from Facebook Ads at a scalable cost. They’d tried a variety of things and were at the end of their rope.

After evaluating their campaigns and target audiences, we realized that there were several potential types of audiences that they hadn’t tested into yet. So, we tried testing some new targeting options, setting up different types of retargeting campaigns and building out specific lookalike audiences.

It didn’t take long for our efforts to start paying off. Revenue increased by 30%, while cost per purchase dropped by 50%. Best of all, return on ad spend doubled.

Our new audiences outperformed their old ones by a huge margin and this discovery led to record sales at an overall lower cost. Why? Because we took the time to explore new options and test additional audiences.

Of course, not every audience you test will work out this well. We’ve had our fair share of flops, too, but that’s why you keep testing. Sometimes you get great results, sometimes you don’t, but as long as you learn something and keep moving forward, you’ll always win in the end.

Conclusion

Don’t ever assume that you’ve completely figured out your marketing. If you aren’t constantly testing new audiences, you’re missing out on big opportunities. Your market is constantly changing. You need to change, too.

It can take time and work to uncover new audiences, but unlocking a new market segment is well worth the effort.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to improve your ecommerce campaigns. For eight other proven tactics we love to use with our clients, check out this eBook. Or, simply let us know you’d like some help here or in the comments and we’d be glad to show you all the hidden potential in your campaigns.