The FieldTest Audience Guide: How to Connect With Your Customers at Every Funnel Stage
Marketing is all about forging relationships with your audience. Whether your brand is a first year DTC operation or a Fortune 500 Goliath, the core of your marketing operation will be finding your core audience and reaching them in a way that feels real, relatable and authentic to your brand. Of course, that also means you’ll have to ensure that your audience really is the right one for your business. This is where things can get a little tricky, especially for newer advertisers, but FieldTest is here to help.
We think that marketers face enough challenges when scaling their business, building an engaged and highly qualified audience shouldn’t be one of them. That’s why we’ve built a powerful set of digital marketing tools to help any brand at any scale find new customers easily and effectively, ll from one simple to use digital platform.
In this guide to building an audience with FieldTest we’ll talk about just what audience targeting is, we’ll go through each stage of the marketing funnel and discuss what role your audience plays in your marketing there, and we’ll discuss how to use the FieldTest tool kit to reach them with your marketing. If you have any questions about the best creative to use for these funnel stages, check out our creative guide from last month.
Let’s start at the top:
What is Audience Targeting?
Essentially, audience targeting is when a digital advertiser places their products or services in front of a specific group of people. More specifically, it’s the use of first-party and third-party data to target particular audiences based on their demographics, interests, location and behaviors.
With audience targeting, this kind of tactical, data-driven filtering helps determine the audience that sees your ads. How you target your message depends on your offerings, campaign goals, and funnel stage. This may sound complicated but it’s really quite simple! At the top of your funnel you’ll reach out to potential customers who have likely never heard of your brand. In the mid-funnel you’ll shift focus to fostering a relationship with the people who responded to top of funnel creatives. At the bottom of the funnel you’ll focus only on the highly qualified intenders who responded to your mid-funnel creative. This means you’ll invest most of your targeting legwork at the top of funnel and use the resulting data to reap returns all the way down.
Who is Your Target Audience?
Of course with such powerful technology at hand and with people’s interests so varied, its extremely important for your audience targeting to be, well, targeted. Your audience is out there but will require the right strategies and tactics in order to find them, create a connection, and eventually make them loyal customers. More generally,it will require you to do a little bit of creative legwork to determine just who your audience is, who exactly is interested in your products.
If you currently have a sturdy customer base, all you need to do is profile your customers. This can be done a number of ways, from utilizing reporting from past campaigns to setting the FieldTest pixel and letting our algorith do the work (more on this later) but if you’ve got a new business or product, you’ll need to define your audience. To do that you’ll need important data based around audience behavior, demographics, and location. This is all about being true to your brand and your product. For example, if you’re selling tractors, you wouldn’t want your ads popping up in major metropolitan markets like New York City or downtown Los Angeles. You’d make sure they appear on the phones of farmers in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. If you’re selling yoga mats, you’ll want to target the cities saturated with yoga studios like San Diego and Portland. Invest a little time and research and you'll know your audiences like the back of your hand!
Now that you’ve got a bit more information on just how audience targeting works, let’s discuss the stages of the marketing funnel and how to put our tools to use building your perfect audience for advertising success.
Top of Funnel - Prospecting
Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re cruising around the internet reading articles, doing some shopping, and staying up to date on your social media feeds. Then, as if out of nowhere, you see a big banner ad for some trail running shoes. You didn’t know you needed these specialty shoes, you didn’t even know they existed before seeing the ad, but now you absolutely have to have them.
You’ve just experienced what digital advertisers call ‘prospecting’, or top of funnel awareness marketing. It’s a tactic that puts ads in front of new audiences who are likely to click and buy the featured product using device data and browsing history. While not every marketer uses it, everyone who has looked at their computer or phone screen has most certainly experienced it.
How to prospect with FieldTest
So how exactly do you set up an upper-funnel marketing campaign with FieldTest? There are a few things you can do. You can begin by using our uploader tool to upload any email lists you’ve collected in the course of your business. This will give you a jump start on our later funnel stage products like retargeting and LAL, but it will also start you off with a strong foundation of proven interested intenders for your products for use in your upper funnel.
Don’t have an email list handy? That’s ok, our platform has millions of searchable data segments baked right into our ad builder. That means accessing the wealth of audience targeting data is as simple as signing up for FieldTest, starting a new campaign and using the audience searchbar to find key interests, habits and locations. It really is that simple!
Our data sourcing and savvy targeting tactics have had incredible campaign success with a range of clients. For example 277 Fifth Avenue, a luxury condominium in New York City, tapped into our vast data inventory and targeted ultra-high net worth investors and specific buying groups that would be most interested in the property. They also targeted luxury shoppers who visited high-end websites around the world such as Sotheby’s or Christie’s. With smart creative and calculated audience targeting, we helped 277 Fifth increase sales from the very first quarter of working together!
With the same kind of creative and critical thinking about your key audience, you’ll be well on your way to building a highly qualified audience of intenders and building a strong relationship with them that will last.
Middle of Funnel - Lookalike Audiences
In the middle layer of your marketing funnel you run into a bit of a challenge, you've gotten the word out about your brand and are beginning to see traffic increase, but your audience needs a little more convincing to finally convert. This is where FieldTest’s technology really takes the center stage in the form of our Lookalike audiences, or Pixel Audiences as they are referred in our platform.
If you have been running social media campaigns, you might have used Lookalike Audiences in the past. But they work a little bit differently with FieldTest. Instead of uploading a list of first party email addresses and trying to find similar customers that way, we are actually looking at the engagement of your ads and, if you have any, your conversions to identify how to best qualify your customers. We believe that while any type of LAL will likely boost your campaign, we are a bit partial to our approach. It depends less on someone's social media persona and what they like or whom they follow and taps more into their 'real world in real time’ interests, decisions and intent.
While any brand can put down the FieldTest pixel and begin to build an LAL from site visitors, this may end up taking some time. For established brands that are already seeing a few hundred conversions happening, the good news is that we will most likely be able to start with a LAL for you right out of the gate. For newer brands that have just launched, don’t worry: a FieldTest sales rep can help put together a strategic plan with you for how we can get you to the point where you have a strong LAL working for you.
Think of Lookalike Audiences as your ‘carpool lane’ to more conversions. Once you get up to cruising speed, you can sit back and watch your ROAS gain momentum.
How to put your custom Lookalike Audience to use
The first step to any FieldTest campaign is implementing the FieldTest Audience Pixel , instructions for this can be found on our support docs or by contacting your FieldTest campaign rep. They can help make sure that we are capturing all of the data needed to build you the kinds of audiences tat will power your scalability and send you tons of qualified traffic to fuel your lower funnel.
Once the pixel is implemented and your conversions have begun to roll in, we will begin to populate your campaign builder with LAL audiences, or Pixel Audiences. These can be found alongside the rest of your audience targeting options in the Target Audience section. We recommend that when choosing these highly optimized audiences you start a new mid-funnel campaign (make sure to label it so you can tell it apart from the rest) and minimize the other forms of targeting as they may impact the overall effect of our LAL audiences. These segments are already selected using state of the art technology, and can be very useful for A/B testing with hand-selected audiences as outlined in the top of funnel section above.
Using this technology to your advantage will put you in a good position to fuel your lower funnel, where the performance really gets turned up!
Bottom of Funnel - Retargeting
Retargeting is a technique used when we take the data provided by your top of funnel campaigns and narrow that pool down to only those intenders who have hit some kind of triggering event. These events can range from things such as placing an item in the shopping cart, signing up for a newsletter, or even making a one-time purchase. We set up these qualifications because they are the single best indicator of an intender who is interested in becoming a repeat customer. By narrowing down the targeting pool to just those people who have completed a highly-qualifying action we vastly increase the conversion performance of this stage, this is why retargeting is the cornerstone of the action phase of your campaign!
Retargeting isn’t just effective as a specialized targeting strategy alone, we recommend our clients maintain a distinct creative strategy in retargeting that drives home the conversion messaging. That means sales, discounts, or other offerings intended to give your intenders that last push over the edge into becoming long-term repeat customers. If you want a good breakdown of how this creative approach affects sales, give our creative guide a read.
Of course, as effective as this strategy is it is not a set it and forget it deal. Retargeting only selects people who have triggered an event up-funnel and without solid upper funnel ads to drive traffic it’s only a matter of time until you will run out of new people to run through retargeting. Think of retargeting as your campaign’s engine, the part of the marketing stack that drives the majority of your sales. Your upper funnel marketing is the fuel being fed into that engine, keeping it running and pushing your revenue higher and higher. Without a successful upper and mid-funnel marketing effort you’ll find your campaign out of fuel and broken down on the side of the road, metaphorically speaking.
How to utilize retargeting with FieldTest
Once you’ve built out your upper and mid-funnel ad campaigns, retargeting your interested customers is fairly straightforward. From your FieldTest dashboard, start a new campaign and upload all of your custom conversion creatives. From there, go to Target Audience and look under your Pixel Audiences section (the same place you found your LAL audiences) here you fill find your retargeting segments such as Site Visitors, Purchasers, or Cart Abandoners. Simply select these groups and your ads will be delivered exclusively to those who have triggered the corresponding action. Again, with smart creative strategy (asking cart abandoners if they forgot something, informing purchasers about new products, offering sales to site visitors, etc) you should have no problem leveraging FieldTest’s powerful technology to drive sales for your brand.
Get in touch to find out how FieldTest can empower you to build high performing ad campaigns and build deep connections with your customers.
