How to Enhance Your Audience Targeting Strategy With AI

AI is really smart, but it doesn’t always know what you know. While advertising platforms, such as Meta and Google suggest using broad audience targeting and letting AI find the right customer, this does leave space for tunnel vision. AI might find the demographics that are converting right now, but it doesn’t necessarily know which markets you want to spend more on today so that you can enjoy a return tomorrow.

When you set up an advertising campaign, you always have to select an objective. That could be sales, consideration, or brand awareness. You also choose what audience you want to target. Traditionally, digital marketers have run granular campaigns that marry up the right target audience with the right objective. However, as advertising platforms have started to introduce more AI tools and capabilities, they have encouraged marketers to go broad and let AI do the work. 

AI does optimise campaigns well and it does optimise them fast. However, it still needs strategic input and a nudge in the right direction. 

Make sure you set up guardrails.

Let’s say that you want to grow your market share among 25 to 35-year-olds. So, you set up a broad prospecting campaign guided by AI, anticipating that your creative will appeal to that group. Initially, the campaign is gaining traction, but when you dig deeper you end up being surprised to find out that your target audience isn’t converting or engaging. The AI has actually prioritised your ads to 55 to 65-year-olds because they are converting more easily and generating a quick return on investment. The AI has started to get tunnel vision based on the data it is receiving.

However, that means that you’re not hitting your strategic goals. Maybe you want to build affinity with a younger audience so that your brand remains relevant in the future. Maybe the ad creative you have always used appeals to the older demographic and you don’t know what ads would appeal to a younger audience. Using this approach, you will struggle to learn about what your younger audience wants to engage with because AI has already started optimising your campaigns based on what it can see is working (i.e. conversions that are easier to generate from the older audience today). 

You might be generating a short-term win, but it’s coming at the cost of its longer-term strategic objectives. So, we need to give AI guardrails. You can get more out of AI when you let it optimise within different campaigns, tailored to different target audiences, each with its own strategic objective.

Give yourself visibility.

It’s important to use your data and give yourself visibility over who is engaging with your campaigns. Imagine that scenario above, but you had been doing it for years without knowing that your ads were never showing to the younger audience that you were trying to reach. When you can see who you’re engaging and whether or not your objectives are being met, then you will know if your campaigns are on track.

Go further than looking at your highest-performing ads and your revenue within the platform. Dig into your demographic reports and analytics accounts to see if the right audiences are converting in the way that you want them to. If they’re not, then you can go back to your campaigns and restructure them in ways that help your AI to refocus and realign with the strategic direction of your brand. If you find that you are reaching that younger demographic, then you can give yourself a pat on the back and keep doing more of what you’re doing. 

Zoom out and look forward. 

AI can’t look forward to the future in the same way that we can. It doesn’t know all of the strategic conversations you have had with other people in your team and the intent behind your business. It’s our responsibility to feed it with that information in some way. 

AI does a great job of freeing up our time for more strategic thinking. But, we can’t let it do our jobs for us. So, rather than just letting it run and do its thing, help it focus on the right goals. When you launch a broad campaign, it will start skewing towards certain audiences very quickly based on the objective set. The more it skews in a certain way, the more it learns about that audience and prioritises it. Then, the less testing it will do on other audiences. If you’re not aware of that, then you could find your business in a vulnerable position when you’re relying too heavily on one market and have worked yourself out of others.

So, be mindful of your marketing objectives and structure your campaigns in a way that enables AI to support them. 

Be proactive.

AI is a powerful tool if we use it proactively and feed it with the right information. Always remember to check that your campaigns are aligned with your strategic goals and ensure that AI is working in the right direction for your business.