Marketing and advertising for your business is a constant competition. Having strong tactics can be the difference between a potential new customer choosing your brand over another. You need to reach the right people at the right time with the right messages. Keeping your messages personalized and using tactics like IP targeting, geotargeting, or geofencing can help bring in new customers. These tactics can seem too new or confusing at first. However, knowing how they work and utilizing them can be very beneficial. We want to tell you everything you need to know about IP targeting and how it can help your business.
What is IP Targeting?
IP targeting is often confused with geotargeting and/or geofencing. Although the three advertising practices are similar, they are not the same. Geofencing involves drawing a virtual barrier around an area and sending ads to all the IP addresses in that area. Geotargeting is more specific than geofencing because it also focuses on demographics. Rather than just showing ads to everyone in the virtual barrier, only some IP addresses are sent the ads.
IP targeting delivers personalized content to devices based on physical location just like geotargeting and geofencing. However, it is more personalized because IP targeting involves researching your audience in a different way. For IP targeting, a list of IP addresses is used to deliver ads to specific households, offices, and businesses. Every device that is connected to the internet has a unique IP address that can be used to target ads. IP targeting allows you to deliver ads to specific homes and businesses and reach all devices logged into the wifi at that address. These IP addresses don’t have to be in a certain virtual barrier like for geotargeting and geofencing. However, if your business is local, you may only target IP addresses in the area.
How IP Targeting Can Help Your Business
Launching an IP targeting campaign is a great tool to use if you’re looking to target a specific audience to let them know about a product or service. This benefit of picking and choosing who to send your ads to is great because you can target the specific kinds of customers that you want to attract, or you can choose who can’t see your ads. The days of your competitors seeing your personalized ads and learning from your marketing tactics are over.
Another rewarding aspect of IP targeting is “match-back.” After you curate the list of IP addresses you want to target and send out ads to them, you can later track your return on investment (ROI) back to the campaign. If you list the addresses of your new customers obtained after the ads are sent out, the two lists of addresses can be compared and specific ROI dollar amounts can be calculated during a post-campaign match-back analysis.
Who should you target?
Determining who or where to target can sometimes be tricky. The most important thing to keep in mind when defining your IP targeting criteria is your audience. It’s important to know exactly who your target audience is in order to make sure your ads are personalized to their wants and needs. Conducting research to determine your target audience (or audiences) before launching your IP targeting campaign is crucial. You won’t see any ROI if you’re sending ads to the wrong people.
Your target audience is the specific group of customers that would be likely to frequent your business. It can be determined by age, gender, location, interests, etc. Once you’ve established who your target audience is (you can have multiple), then you can determine where you think that audience will access the internet. Is this audience within a certain geographic location? Are they accessing the internet at home or at a place of work? These are great starting questions to ask yourself. Once you know who you should target, your IP targeting campaign can begin.
How We Can Help
Auburn Advertising is a public service of Inner Spark Creative, and we want to assist you with all of your advertising needs. We are a full-service marketing and advertising agency located in the Auburn-Opelika area that offers IP targeting for our clients on top of many other services like branding, web design, and search engine optimization. Contact us today to request a proposal for your business. We would love to hear from you and discuss how Inner Spark Creative can help you grow!