Direct Digital Advertising: Who Are You Targeting Digitally?

Who Are You Targeting Digitally

Digital marketing is a great way to get in front of your audience and surround them with your message. Whether they are searching for answers online, browsing a website, or interacting on social media, you have the opportunity to reach your best prospects. Most of the time, this is done by selecting demographics for the audience you want to target, but you won’t know exactly who they are. Direct digital advertising allows you to target specific households, so you have control over who is seeing your ads. Direct digital advertising boosts your direct mail campaigns, reduces marketing waste, and delivers higher quality response rates. 

Direct Mail Boost 

When you use direct digital advertising, you can target the individuals on your direct mail list. Adding a digital boost not only extends the life of your mail piece, but it also keeps the offer in front of your audience.  

Display and social media ads create brand recognition and provide direct ways for your target audience to respond. Your ads are only served to the people on your list while they are active online, so you can make the most of your advertising efforts. Emails, still considered a more trustworthy form of advertising, can deliver additional information. You can also send timely reminders that an offer is about to expire and create a sense of urgency.  

Presenting a unified message on multiple platforms provides more marketing touches and builds campaign momentum. By incorporating a digital boost, you are giving your audience more opportunities to say yes and act on the offer.  

Reduce Marketing Waste

If you target a general audience on a digital advertising platform, you won’t know exactly who is seeing your ad. You can narrow down the audience to some general demographics, but not everyone in that audience will be a good fit for your offer. You don’t get to pick the best prospects in the group which leads to a lot of marketing waste. Regular digital advertising gives you very little, if any, control over who you are advertising to.  

Direct digital marketing lets you target specific households, so you can choose the very best prospects and customers to target. Instead of paying to get in front of an unknown audience, maximize your marketing impact and ROI. When you use direct digital marketing, you are only paying to advertise to the households you’ve selected. 

Accurate Response Rates 

The most important aspect of any marketing campaign is the results. You want to know if it worked? Did your sales increase? Who responded? Regular digital advertising delivers your ads to an audience, but it shields the actual household information from you. You have no idea who saw your ad and responded, and trying to determine results is tricky. 

With direct digital advertising, you start with names and postal addresses, so you have a known audience. When the campaign ends, you can match up your marketing list to your transaction file and see accurate response results. This process is called a response analysis or matchback.  

Another benefit of using direct digital is you have more data to work with. You’ll have a name, postal address, and email/IP address to help you identify more responders. Once you have your response data, you can analyze the demographics and see how it compares to who you targeted. Are you going after the right households or should you make adjustments?  

Accurate response data enables you to feed your results back into your customer model and hone-in on top customers. Knowing who your top customers are lets you improve your strategy for finding and identifying your top prospects.  

Ready to Target Specific Households? 

Direct digital marketing lets you target the households you want to target and keep your offer in front of them. If you want to learn more about how you can add a digital boost to your next direct mail campaign, reach out to our team