Unlock the full power of Audience Targeting

In today’s highly competitive world of advertising, the ability to connect with the right audience is paramount to success. However, with the challenging economic climate, advertisers are faced with the task of doing more with less, and performance expectations are increasing. It’s also becoming more challenging for marketers to pinpoint their ideal audience with the impending deprecation of the third-party cookie. To meet these demands, advertisers are turning to Audience Targeting.

Understanding customer behavior

Understanding customer behavior is becoming more challenging. As browsers implement tracking prevention measures, it makes it more difficult to get a deep understanding of audience behaviors. As we move forward, these difficulties will only increase; this is why building up your first-party data is more important than ever before.

The key to success

The key to success in Audience Targeting comes from being strategic with your approach. It helps to build strong partnerships with companies like Microsoft, who have access to rich first-party data signals that can help you grow your business. Essentially, you’re fueling your first-party data with our first-party data.

Our audience intelligence, made up of signals such as search and web activity, content and brand preferences, demographics and many more, connects you to an audience with intent. We use billions of data points, combining first-party data across Microsoft properties to identify consumer intent and increase performance. These signals are then all bundled together into Audience Targeting features that you can use on your campaigns across the Microsoft Search and the Microsoft Audience Networks. Tapping into rich intent signals allows you to drive highly personalized engagements with your customers, which can lead to better marketing performance for you.

Microsoft Advertising’s first-party data can help you identify customer intent.

The consumer decision journey

We know that today consumer decision journeys are no longer linear, and, as a result, you need to consider the full funnel when targeting your potential customers. As an advertiser, you need to connect with customers multiple times throughout their journey, ideally serving the right message at the right time, and overall, improving the customer experience. To help give you some inspiration, here are some recommendations for the tactics that you should use at the various parts of the journey.

Reaching your audience across the journey

The right tactic to use and when to use them

Putting it into practice

Building up first-party data

That all sounds great—but practically speaking, how can you build up your first-party data and improve your return on investment (ROI)? Let’s say your goal is to reach a new audience and to grow awareness for your brand. In this case, you may want to think about creating a campaign on the Microsoft Audience Network, using beautiful imagery to showcase your brand and targeting In-market Audiences that are relevant to your business. Once someone clicks on that ad and lands on your site, you should encourage your site visitors to sign up to your newsletter by offering them a discount on their next purchase. After this, the user is likely to stay on your site and browse your product offerings.

Converting potential customers

As you start to build up your first-party data and gather more information from your customers, you can bring this into Microsoft Advertising by using our Customer Match feature. Then, you can bid up on this specific audience and encourage them to convert. You’ve now sparked that customer’s interest, so the next time they come back to Bing, because you’re bidding higher for that audience, you’re likely to show up in a higher position on the search engine results page, which increases the probability of that customer clicking and converting.

Improve your ROI

Our Audience Targeting features have been proven to drive increased conversion rates and reduce cost per acquisition. Overall, using any Audience Targeting can help you to achieve a 60% higher conversion rate on average.1 However, you can get even better results if you align the right tactics with the goals that you’re trying to achieve. To learn more about what Audience Targeting can do for your business, download our one-pager.

As you can see, building up first-party data is essential for successful marketing in today's digital world. But collecting and using it effectively can be challenging without the right tools and strategies. That's why Microsoft Advertising offers a range of audience solutions that can help you improve your ROI, reach new customers, understand their behavior, increase their loyalty, and, overall, optimize your campaigns in an efficient way to stretch your marketing budget and drive better performance. Don't miss this opportunity to boost your marketing ROI with Microsoft's audience solutions.

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Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. You can use the Microsoft Advertising Feedback portal, in-product feedback, Twitter, or Instagram. You can also email us at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com or contact Support.

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