Top 3 Ways to Personalize Your Ads

MediaGo Staff | 02/22/2021

With ever-increasing advancements in ad targeting and filtering, marketers have more options then ever when it comes to zeroing in on their desired audience. But more options mean more decisions — each of which can give rise to new challenges. 

In today’s post, we’ll discuss one of the more difficult challenges that marketers and advertisers face: how to personalize your ads to make them as effective as possible, without appearing creepy. 

Read on for our three best practices for unobtrusive ad personalization.

This might seem like painfully obvious advice, but bear with us. Knowing your audience is about more than just having a general idea of your target demographic. If you’re able to segment your customers by a variety of dimensions, such as age range, gender, location, spending power and more, then you’ll be able to create specific audience personas. 

Personas go beyond basic demographics and can help bring your customers to life in 3D, allowing you to paint a more detailed picture of their entire lifestyle. Having a clearer picture of who your customers are will enable you to create ads that are geared toward real people. Your ads will feel genuine rather than creepy, and perhaps most importantly, your ads will resonate with your audience and drive more clicks.

After you’ve drilled down into your audience segments, it’s time to figure out which part of the funnel you want to target. This is an essential step, since it will determine the specific messaging of your ads. 

For example, maybe you’re running a top-funnel lead-gen campaign for auto insurance. The message that you put forward should not only resonate with the broader audience persona that you’ve identified, but should also ring true for that specific persona at that specific stage in their customer journey. 

Let’s say you’re specifically targeting first-time auto insurance buyers. They might be more price conscious than repeat customers, or they might still be learning about premiums and coverage options. Striking the right tone is essential to achieving more conversions and avoiding turning customers off with messaging that doesn’t resonate. 

These days, advertisers have a lot of targeting options at their disposal. The key is to leverage this targeting in a subtle way that doesn’t alert potential customers to the fact that the ads are specifically directed at them. 

A common example you’ve no doubt experienced is geo-targeting by city or zip code. People are naturally curious about what’s going on in their local community, so when they see an ad that mentions the name of their city, they’ll be inclined to click it to learn more. Cities and zip codes work particularly well in this regard, because even though each of us is subconsciously aware of the fact that we’re being targeted, it doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy. After all, cities are home to hundreds of thousands of people — and we’re just one among many.

We hope you’ve found this primer on ad personalization helpful. Remember to keep checking in on the MediaGo blog for more practical advice on digital advertising.