5 Top Marketers Share Their POVs on Audience Targeting & Why It Matters

Marketing leaders agree: Having a solid understanding of your audience is essential to success with SEO, campaign strategy and performance, accurate measurement, achieving real business outcomes, and more. Of course, that’s something we know very well at OMI. With audience building being one of our core services, it’s gratifying to discover that top industry peers agree.

Take a look at the insights below from our B2B Influence podcast guests and recent industry articles, with each expert offering their point of view (POV) on why prioritizing your audience matters:

• From a Programmatic POV: On a recent B2B Influence podcast interview, Chris DeMartine, Founder and CEO of Programmatic B2B, shared that he and his team made an important shift to dig deeper into their audience data. They now have the capability with every client report to show which companies are engaging – such as website visits and time on site. Reporting back at the account level, they can tell clients with certainty if the message is getting to the right people. Email has always been transparent with measurement, Chris said, but his goal was to take that to display and native advertising. With more knowledge in hand, they know who their audience is and can further refine their targeting to improve outcomes with future campaigns.

Chris is also using contextual AI to identify audiences looking up specific topics in real time, based on an intent keyword – and that’s an entirely different discussion, which we hope to write about soon. Go here for the full podcast episode.

• From an SEO POV, understanding your target audience helps you find the right keywords, identify warm leads, and optimize SEO, according to Brandon Leibowitz, Owner of SEO Optimizers. He breaks down audience targeting, budgeting, remarketing, backlinks, and more on the B2B Influence podcast. Go here for the full episode.

 

• From a Strategy and Measurement POV: Using an ideal customer profile and then blanketing as large an audience as possible with your marketing messages is no longer a viable strategy. “Measure the buyer journey to find the gaps in your marketing funnel and sales pipeline --  and to unlock the strategies to close those gaps…Use data to understand who your targets are.” Kyle Mealy, Founder and CEO of Next Level Revenue, shares why measurement is key to audience targeting and SMB marketing success on the B2Binfluence podcast. Go here for the full episode.

 

• From a Campaign Performance POV: “The best tech stack ever won't drive marketing success: You need a good strategy and an understanding of your audience first,” says David Zimmerman, Fractional CMO and Digital Marketing Consultant. David recently shared his tips for building campaigns that perform, delivering real business impact (on the B2B Influence podcast). Go here for the full podcast episode.

 

• From Our Own Customer Acquisition POV: We were recently quoted in Forbes about the power of B2B2C matching for more effective targeting, personalization, and reach with prospect-focused email automation. This same approach can be applied to custom audience building across a variety of omni-channel strategies:

“The more information you can collect about your prospects, the better you can customize your email automation. You can build more complete prospect profiles using techniques like B2B2C matching, which provides insights into personal and professional attributes for improved personalization and reach.”

Make no mistake, it’s a losing proposition to cut corners when it comes to understanding your audience. In today’s often volatile economic climate--where marketers are under pressure to do more with less, from driving results to reducing waste and proving ROI--one of the most powerful levers available is to focus on the audience data fueling your campaigns. But finding and engaging the right people isn’t a one-and-done task—it’s an ongoing process of refinement.

Check out our recent blog on AI-powered precision audience building for more insights, and reach out to our team today at request@outwardmedia.com for a complimentary consultation on how to create a precision custom audience that will have a meaningful impact on your business.