Customer Targeting: 4 Common Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Don’t you wish your targeting strategy was as easy as casting a spell? Companies all around spend so much time and money on marketing strategies, it’s no wonder we want to make the most of our efforts. Customer targeting is an advantage our technological advancement has allowed us to establish in our marketing and business strategies. But alas, with any great thing comes a price — following your customer targeting strategy without making these four common mistakes. Before we get to the good stuff, we would like to point out that our magic is not the obvious, tactical process that many business owners still believe it to be. Instead, it’s more philosophically inclined. But who is your customer? We should probably establish that first before we Wizards cast some magic on your target marketing strategies. Your target customer is the person you consider to be the most likely to purchase your product or service. When you take this into account and identify your customer, you're already ready for the next step. Knowing your ability to bewitch the workings of your target audience won’t happen without us — and if you take advantage of our WIZdom, market mastery will happen in no time. Especially if you’re certain to avoid these four common customer targeting mistakes.

What is Customer Targeting?

Customer targeting is a sales strategy that will enhance your understanding of your customers and audience. Customer segmentation becomes a possible advantage of market targeting once you understand your target audience and customer. Customer Segmentation allows us to group customers based on target audience demographics. In other words, a way to group consumers with similar characteristics (i.e. geographics, demographics and behavior.). By segmenting your target customers, you can better serve more of them based on their similarities in these areas.

What is Overtargeting? Why is It Not Good for Every Business?

While customer targeting is defined as reaching the optimal target audience for an ad campaign – overtargeting is almost contrary to that. It happens when a target customer has seen or heard our ads too often and did not perform the desired action (such as following through with the CTA). Overtargetting happens — either because they fall outside our defined customer base or again because we serve them too many ads within a short time frame. This issue can happen in two main ways: If you are targeted by location then it's highly unlikely that any new users will be added during the campaign. And if you're targeted based on behavior, then your average cookie lasts longer than the length of most campaigns (about 6 weeks). Overtargetting was said to be the bane of marketing strategies by the reputable Jerry Daykin, EMEA Senior Media Director at GSK. He wasn’t wrong. At Wizard of Ads®, we know that as advertisers, we must find the balance in the pendulum between too much and just enough target marketing. No business wants to “double, double (on customer targeting),” because as Shakesphere put it.…it will inevitably lead to toil and trouble.

What Are Common Mistakes in Customer Targeting?

Given the mysteries and monsters today’s market brings, avoiding these common mistakes when customer targeting will ensure you and your company win more of those sales you’ve been chasing after.

Targeting Those Who Are unwilling or Unable to Buy

We see this happen all over the place. In fact, we’d wager it’s happened to us all as we shop online. We must ask you to travel back in time with us, to the days of commercialized television. Don’t be scared, it’s only a memory. Think back to a time we were enticed with our program but were constantly interrupted by commercials advertising things that had nothing to do with us. What a waste, right? See I told you, nothing to be scared by — just a targeting marketing example of how common these mistakes were even then. We can’t expect to be successful in hitting any further stage in our pipelines if we aren’t reaching an available or willing customer base, to begin with. You won’t see many children calling into an advertisement capable of purchasing their actual product.

Targeting for “Small” Groups While Disregarding the Rest

Remember what we said about the great balancing act we advertisers must tread with our pendulum of customer targeting? Well, it fits as a good prophecy for this marketing advice in that we must balance how specific we are in targeting our customer bases. It’s important to have somewhat of a specific customer targeting approach, but if we get too specific or “small” with our target market, we won’t be left with much of a populace of leads and prospects. Maybe the rest of us want your product too! A small target market will become saturated too quickly; jousting our competitors would turn into more of a jest.

Oversaturating

In hopes of not oversaturating you with repeated targeted marketing tactics we used different terminology – but we’ll let you in on a little magic trick… “oversaturating” and “overtargeting” are one and the same. We at Wizards of Ads just want to stress the importance of avoidance of this in your customer targeting strategies. Oversaturating is again defined as the over-provision of ads from the same brands, bombarding the target audience enough to make them less likely to invest in your brand. You don’t want that — and we at Wizards of Ads don’t want that for you. This is why diversifying and balancing your efforts and ads with your customer targets will ensure these efforts are more likely to spark sales.

Targeting Too Broadly

You’ve probably noticed by now, we wise Wizards of Ads like to be thorough in covering all possibilities. This is why we feel the need to warn you of the dangers that come with both targeting too “small” of a customer base and those of customer targeting too broadly. We’ve all heard the saying “too much of a good thing is as if you have nothing.” The same goes for customer targeting in such a big customer populace. If you compile a target marketing strategy that resonates with absolutely everyone, it would be as if you targeted no one at all. Our customers may be able to be segmented into similar niches in our markets, but each one of them brings something important and unique to the opportunity! Think about it, we love what makes us unique. – But we also love validation from those who feel the same way or enjoy the same things as we do.

So, Why Would a Person Choose to Do Business with You at All?

Well, we think the answer to that is simple: Because you are worth doing business with! But we want your customers to know that too, and they will not know that if you continue to make the same customer targeting mistakes. Let’s recap on those four common mistakes again before you head out, shall we?

• Avoiding targeting the unable and unwilling
• Oversaturating your target market
• Targeting too small of a customer base
• Targeting too broad of a customer base

Here at Wizard of Ads®, though, we get that there’s a lot more to success than simply trying to avoid a few common customer targeting mistakes You might have some obstacles you’re struggling to overcome that are far more unique to your organization. But we’re here to help. At Wizard of Ads, our success comes from your success. Contact us today!