You only have one shot to make a great first impression. Whether it’s a job interview, a first date, or a chance encounter with a childhood idol, there’s a small window of opportunity to charm the pants off whoever’s in your purview. Luckily in these scenarios, you’re already at an advantage—your target Audience is sitting right there. It’s on you to market yourself effectively enough to land that job, score a second date, or get a selfie with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But great first impressions are hard to crack when your ideal audience isn’t around to hear what you’ve got to say.

This is one of the biggest challenges Digital marketers face today. In a quest to make an impactful first impression among relevant, in-market buyers, digital marketers not only have to create ads that effectively communicate brand value; they also have to get those ads in front of people who actually care. Otherwise, your messaging falls on deaf ears. And deaf ears don’t convert.

So what do you do if your digital ad delivery is less than ideal? Step one: don’t freak out. Just because you’re struggling to get ads in front of relevant audiences doesn’t mean you have to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. You’ve already invested a lot of time and money into creating those ads, so why flush all that hard work down the tubes? Instead, try one of these four tips to improve delivery and audience reach for your next digital campaign:

Four Ways to Improve Digital Ad Delivery

• Pinpoint the Right Audience

You know the old saying about casting a wide net? Well, in this case, that wide net doesn’t always get the results you’re looking for. Sure, you can reach audiences at scale, but what are the chances those people all find your ads relevant? Instead, try taking a more targeted approach by building custom audience profiles. This gives digital marketers the opportunity to drive brand awareness and education to more appropriate audiences with genuine interest in your products or services.

Almost every major digital advertising platform has a feature to help marketers hyper-curate audiences for optimal ad delivery. Facebook has Custom Audiences, Twitter has Tailored Audiences, Google has Customer Match, and Amazon has Advertiser Audiences. These features enable advertisers to deliver laser-targeted ads to existing customers through various channels. Marketers can then analyze both click-through and engagement rates to determine which customers show the most propensity to purchase. As a result, marketers can double down on intent leads to make more efficient use of their advertising spend.

• Create Customer Personas

How much do you really know about your target customers anyway? What do they like? What makes them tick? And how is your product or service going to solve any one of their particular pain points? That’s a lot of information to unpack, and these questions might seem difficult to answer if your target audience is on the larger side. But the most fundamental step in optimizing digital ad delivery to potential buyers is to understand who exactly these customers are and what it is they want. And the best way to do this is to create customer personas.

Customer personas are fictional characterizations of ideal buyers from across your entire target audience. Most of the time, these personas highlight roles within an organization with the power to decide if a product or service is valuable enough for purchase (i.e., executives, senior leaders, IT directors, etc.). By leveraging market research, including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and objectives, as well as historical customer data, marketers can get a pretty detailed picture of who their ideal buyer really is. This key data, then, allows marketers to prioritize efforts on relevant prospects with more intent to convert.

For more details on targeted customer personas, check out our infographic here.

• Mitigate Audience Overlap

Now that you’ve honed your digital marketing strategy for each individual persona, don’t let all that hard work go to waste. Beware of the audience overlap!

Audience overlap happens when you deliver two separate ads to a crossover audience on the same platform, even though each ad speaks directly to a respective audience. The larger the overlap, the more disappointing your campaigns perform.

And even though one would think overlapping audiences gives marketers a better opportunity to increase ad visibility and brand awareness, it’s quite the opposite. Think about it: if you use the same digital platform to deliver two different ads meant for two different audiences, your ads essentially compete against and cancel each other out. This then lends to an increase in costs-per-click and throws a wrench into your marketing budget.

Good thing Facebook has a tool to mitigate this entirely. The platform’s Audience Overlap feature allows you to compare separate audience segments and determine the percentage of overlap between them. You can then use this data to decide which audiences to exclude for optimal ad delivery.

• Test Ad Relevance

Ok, you’ve narrowed down your target customers, identified key personas, and minimized audience overlap. Now that your ads are up and running, it’s time to see if they actually resonate with potential buyers. Because why make the effort to advertise and not get anything back in return?

Running relevance diagnostics on existing ads gives marketers the ability to analyze overall quality, engagement, and conversion rates. The higher ads rank, the more likely they deliver to favorable audiences. Relevance scoring also helps marketers:

• Decrease ad delivery costs
• Test creative options before launching a campaign
• Optimize campaigns already in progress

Once again, Facebook offers a helpful tool to measure ad delivery performance, and it’s called Relevance Score. To learn more about Relevance Score, plus key strategies for improving ad performance, click here.

Interested in optimizing your digital ad delivery? DemandScience can help. Check out our website for more details, or contact one of our data intelligence experts for a demo.

The post Make a Great First Impression with Your Digital Ads appeared first on PureB2B.