The marketing days of “toss it against the wall & see if anything sticks” are long, long gone. I understood the value of targeting my audience several decades ago when handling marketing and promotion for an NBA team then the Harlem Globetrotters.
The NBA then was not the dominant pro sports force it is today. Sellout crowds were rare and season ticket sales even more rare. College basketball was often a bigger draw than the NBA. And where NBA teams shared a market with a minor league ice hockey team the skaters usually drew bigger crowds.
My success came when I understood how to target my NBA audience in a market with pro football, major league baseball and a minor league hockey team – all with Division 1 college teams in our drawing area.
What I learned in my two NBA seasons played well when hired by the Harlem Globetrotters to bring needed skills to that venerable enterprise. Our tools then were rudimentary, but the basics haven’t changed much over time.
Selling online is most effective when you know your target audience and provide service to buyers. That service includes information related to the customer’s problem and how best to select the most valuable (your) solution.
Sure, you can broadside advertising outlets hoping enough people will see your ad and decide to buy. Smarter Internet Marketers know that efficiency of purpose and a solid sales funnel ensures great returns and positive customer creation.
The purpose of business is creating customers. You may add “retaining” to that simple phrase. The purpose of business is not to make money.
What?????
That is not what most of us learn is it?
You can never make money without customers. Concentrate on creating customers and the money flows. Retain those customers, converting them into returning buyers and you make a lot of money.
One of my better IM tools is AdWords. This highly informative article first appeared online at SearchEngineWatch.com. It discusses how to target buyers you wish to attract to your sales funnel.
How to target high-income consumers with AdWords
There are many industries in which being able to target high net worth individuals is useful within AdWords.
Whether you are selling high-end investments, expensive cars, loans or clothes, targeting high-end individuals within AdWords will help you improve your return on investment.
Today I am going to be showing you a deeply hidden gem within AdWords that allows you to target people based on their household income. It works using data from Google that is sourced from this AdWords Help post.
“Target locations by demographics to reach groups of people based on their location’s approximate average household income. Based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), advertisers are able to target ads to certain areas according to their average household income. This feature is currently available for U.S. locations only.”
You can target people by household incomes that are in:
- Top 10%
- 11-20%
- 21-30%
- 31-40%
- Lower 50%
One of the issues however with targeting users by household income is that if you are using very granular targeting such as by city or zip code Google will respect this targeting over income targets.
So for example if you are targeting the whole of the USA with a household income target and then you target New York with a bid modifier of 20% then Google would respect the bid modifier for New York over the modifier for high income targets.
What percentage of traffic comes from each target bucket?
Early reports of the percentage of traffic from each target bucket have been published by bloggers. You will see that on average, users in the top 10% will have an income of $146,001 per year, with the bottom 50% having an income of less than $64,000 per year.
When looking at the percentage of clicks, 19.7% come from users with an average household income of $64,000 or less per year, with just 1.8% coming from households with an average income of $146,001 or more.
How To Target High Net Worth Individuals in Adwords
STEP 1. Go to your campaign settings along the top menu, and then select all settings from the sub menu as shown below.
STEP 2. Within the targeting options go to advanced targeting as shown in the screenshot below.
STEP 3. In the advanced settings menu select location groups and then from the drop down select “demographics” as shown below.
STEP 4. Enter the location that you would like to target within the location box and then select the household income tier that you would like to target.
How to layer targeting methods to change bids
If you have a product which people from lower-income households are likely to purchase, but a larger majority of your customers will be higher net worth individuals, you may want to consider using layered targeting.
For example, if I am targeting New York, I would add both New York as a location and then add New York (Top 10% by Income) as a location as shown below.
You can then use bid modifiers to appear higher in Google’s results for higher net worth individuals. You can see in the example that bids would be increased by 10% for higher net worth individuals.
Conclusion
There are countless industries where this deeply hidden targeting feature will be very effective at improving your Adwords performance.
There are hundreds of different keywords that where the intention is dramatically changed when you compare the top 10% of earners with the bottom 50%. If you are targeting one of these markets, you should definitely consider testing this strategy.
If you have any questions about this feature please feel free to comment below with your questions.
Wesley Parker is CEO of Clicteq (http://clicteq.com) and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.
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End Notes –
The important thing is to start marketing your products and services. Start from wherever you are. A common mistake is endless study and refinement before placing any ads. You can begin with a simple $5 per day Facebook Ads budget and scale up from there.
Get into the game. Sure, training is important. But you cannot learn to swim without getting into the pool. Here’s an opportunity to learn how one person used the Internet to become a WiFi Millionaire.
Click here and download your copy of this incredible story with details how to make money from anywhere – All you need is a little know-how and an Internet connection.
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