Brand awareness is a central goal for any marketing strategy. It measures how well your target audience recognizes your brand. In other words, brand awareness shows how well you stack up against your competition. But which targeting option is best for achieving brand awareness?
Brand awareness campaigns can both grow your business and safeguard against competitors stealing your market share. Cultivating high levels of brand awareness keeps your brand top of mind, increasing the likelihood of conversion and word-of-mouth referrals. To build brand awareness, you need to reach users likely to connect with and remember your brand. The best way to reach this valuable segment of consumers and increase brand awareness is leveraging custom affinity audiences.
Search engines, social ad networks, and other platforms categorize affinity audiences according to their characteristics. Like audience segments for traditional ad campaigns (e.g., TV and print), affinity audiences are defined by their demographics, interests, and behavior. Unlike TV and print, digital platforms let you get even more specific when building affinity audiences.
On digital platforms, you can shape an affinity audience to more closely match your brand’s target customer. You can create custom affinity audiences of people who visit certain site pages, download apps or engage with certain content. While it’s tempting to build very specific audiences, you need to narrow down your target without getting too focused. Too much specificity in custom affinity audiences risks losing out on potential customers who don’t fit an exact profile.
Developing custom affinity audience campaigns differs depending on which digital platform you’re using. Let’s break down how to approach this strategy on the main digital platforms.
Which targeting option is best for achieving brand awareness on Google?
With Google, you can set up custom audience segments for your Display, Discovery, Gmail, and Video campaigns. You do this by adding relevant keywords, site links, and app downloads. Then, Google shows ads to people with interests, web traffic behavior, or purchase intentions that fit these terms.
To identify specifics for your Google Ads Custom Affinity Audience targeting, you can:
- Run a “Where ads showed” report to identify your top-performing placements and add these sites.
- Add competitors’ sites to target their audiences.
- Add web sites for events and conferences that relate to your brand.
- Add terms that align with user behavior (advised on Google’s support page). For example, a running shoe company may want to target the Avid Marathon Runners segment instead of the Sports Fans segment. Marathon runners have more intention to buy running shoes than a broad selection of Sports Fans.
- Add action-based terms users search for lower down the purchasing funnel. For example, the running shoe company could add terms like “improve running time” or “running tips.”
Which targeting option is best for achieving brand awareness on Meta?
From longtime fans to new site visitors, Meta’s Custom Audiences feature connects you with people already interested in your brand. By importing information from your CRM or email lists, you can also connect with current customers and contacts. If your brand has physical stores, you can also leverage in-person sales information, like recent purposes, for online retargeting.
Meta’s pixel allows you to automatically create Custom Audiences based on site visitors who take certain actions. For example, you can target visitors who browse product pages or add items to their cart. Then, you can retarget ads to this custom audience for products or services they viewed on your site.
Which targeting option is best for achieving brand awareness on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn’s Website Demographics tool lets you collect data about the professional attributes of people who visit your site. All you need to do is install an Insight Tag to your site to get started. Professional attributes you can track include job titles, seniority, function, company, industry, location, and more. Once you’ve collected this data, you can use it to create targeted LinkedIn ad campaigns.
Define your relevant audience in the broadest terms possible if you want to raise brand awareness at scale. According to LinkedIn, targeting parameters like industry, job function, or broad-ranging skills are ideal for this objective. LinkedIn Campaign Manager gives you an estimate of your likely audience size so you can reach your goals most efficiently. Typically two targeting parameters are ideal for cost efficiency, and targeting broadly will lead to lower competing bids.
LinkedIn’s Website Retargeting function helps you later show ads to your site’s visitors. This can be a powerful and budget-friendly way to reach affinity audiences. Retargeted ads boast a click-thru rate 10 times higher than a standard display ad. They are also 70% more likely to convert.
To achieve brand awareness, you have to stay relevant
Whether its ads or organic content, consumers face an overwhelming amount of information online today. To crack the code of brand awareness, you have to break through that noise.
Custom Affinity Audiences effectively and efficiently drive brand awareness because they connect relevant brands to interested consumers. If you increase the relevancy of your ads, you increase the chances consumers will find value in your brand. Once you’ve increased brand awareness with custom affinity audiences, you can focus on maximizing conversions and turning fans into referrals.
Of course, your ad campaigns are only as powerful as your ad creative. To fully unlock the power of custom affinity audiences and build maximum brand awareness, you need click-worthy ad creative designed with your target audience in mind. Need help designing the perfect ads to build your brand? The ad design experts at SketchDeck are ready to tackle your projects on demand.
