Finding the right ad audience is like being a detective. You ask big questions and gather as much data as possible to make informed decisions. You may find certain demographics, like age, location, and interests, that bring in the most effective audience for your campaigns. However, just defining your business is not enough to find the perfect customer.

For example, let’s say you’re an athletic wear brand ideal for athleisure. Focusing on interests like working out, gyms, or even crossfit, is obvious and casts a wide net. Almost 100% of your customers should fall under this category when starting out. Instead, consider mid-level interests that could narrow down the customer base, such as nutrition, footwear, and hydro-flasks. You could go even further by considering specific external habits your customer might have, such as where they shop or the car they drive.

Go Broad Or Go Home

When in doubt, casting a wide net will always attract the most amount of potentially interested buyers. The major benefit of targeting a cold audience is gaining new eyes and achieving a low cost per interaction, although a lower conversion rate is common as well.

Sticking to our theoretical athleisure brand – targeting a broad audience will generate plenty of attention, but in such a major industry, doing this approach can be a double-edged sword. Your ads will likely appear alongside those of industry giants like Nike and Lululemon, which presents tough competition.

Let’s Narrow the Search

Let’s say you’re seeing people engage with your content at a great rate, stay on the website for a while, but they aren’t necessarily converting at a high volume. We can add a few interests that further define our customer which should find more willing-to-buy customers, working off of our earlier work.

If our broad audience is the definition of our business, this more focused audience defines the industry we work within. Like how we’ve said above about adding in the specific interests of nutrition or footwear. Keeping the audience at this mid level of concentration is one of the most consistent and used styles as you get volume and accuracy.

Create a Tight Knit Audience

There are a few reasons to narrow down even further within an audience, where you are finding the perfect buyer each time. If you want the highest possible conversion rate, going extremely specific can do that, although your audience will be incredibly small. Lowering the budget but still wanting results is another common reason to get the most likely to convert customers. That way money is always going to the highest chance of a sale. In order to take this route it will become almost like defining the habits of each buyer, even focusing heavily on age and location play into effect. Finding one platform and placement style also work.

Creating an audience is never an exact science, varieties of factors play into account everyday. Price of the product, the marketplace and even the economy, time of year and buying season for the industry (summer sales in December we’re looking at you). Feel free to test several out, go broad, go focused, go narrow, but whatever one works for you is going to be unique as you and your business itself.