Table of Contents:
- What is a target audience strategy?
- What is your target audience strategy?
- What a target audience strategy looks like
- Leveraging the Modern Marketing Stack
- The target audience playbook for eCommerce
- You could do some of this by hand. Here’s where it stops holding.
- See the whole marketing motion with Untitled
Key takeaways
- A target audience strategy is the connective layer above your marketing tools. It defines who you are going after, how you reach them across every channel, and why.
- Most eCommerce stacks hold fragments of the same customer in separate places. Shopify and your email platform know the buyers, your ad platform knows the clickers, and the majority of store visitors leave anonymously without being recorded anywhere.
- Identifying the real person behind an anonymous session, then reading buyer intent while it is still live, turns that fragmented data into audiences you can act on. Untitled indexes more than 36,000 intent topics, so brands can find in-market shoppers before those shoppers ever visit the site.
- Audiences only produce revenue when they reach the channels where selling happens, which means syncing them into email, paid media, CTV, and direct mail, suppressing customers who already bought, and reporting ROAS at the audience level rather than the campaign level.
Finding your target audience as an eCommerce brand differs from company to company. The majority of consumer brands leverage similar channels, typically a mix of Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok and potentially an email tool like Klaviyo.
However, developing a target audience strategy can be challenging in a crowded space. This post will outline several consumer brand target audience strategies that Untitled has seen work across our eCommerce clients, and how brands can cut through the digital noise and connect with real people likely to buy their products.
What is a target audience strategy for an eCommerce brand?
Let’s start by defining what a target audience strategy is for a consumer brand. To start, Untitled’s definition of a target audience strategy is the connective layer above your tools: the deliberate answer to who you’re going after, how you reach them across every channel, and why.
For an eCommerce brand, it means knowing the real person behind an anonymous session and acting on that across email, paid, and mail from one place. Not a pixel. Not a list. The strategy and how those marketing motions should work.
Before we go any further, it’s important to ask yourself one key question.
What is your target audience strategy for your eCommerce store today?
Not the tools. Not the tactics. The actual strategy. Most eCommerce operators can’t answer it cleanly, and that isn’t a personal failing. Most marketing teams follow what they’ve seen work historically:
- Running campaigns on Meta Ads, and leveraging Advantage+
- Google Shopping campaigns or search campaigns expanding with AI-Max
- A retargeting layer to bring users back to the online store
- Some form of cart abandonment through Kalviyo or something similar
- Shopify email retargeting, whether natively or through an ESP
Every one of these tactics and tools made sense the day you bought it. The problem is, none of them were ever introduced to each other.
So here is what those tools can’t see or connect. The overwhelming majority of the people browsing your store leave anonymously, and your retargeting pixel only ever knew a sliver of them. Shopify and your email platform know the buyers. Your ad platform knows the clickers.
Each holds one fragment of the same customer, and nothing in your marketing stack is responsible for turning those fragments back into a person. That’s the gap. This section is just naming it.
What a target audience strategy looks like for an eCommerce brand
To restate, a target audience strategy is not another tool you add to your marketing stack. It’s the deliberate way to answer who you’re going after and how you convert them across channels.
Now, more than ever, it’s important to meet customers across every channel. We call this omnichannel marketing. For your target audience strategy to work effectively in a crowded world full of AI agents, bots, and digital noise, you can’t solely rely on what worked in 2021.
Leveraging the Modern Marketing Stack to target your audience
Applied to eCommerce, the Modern Marketing Stack and a connective identity layer accomplish three things a drawer full of point solutions never adds up to on its own:
- It knows the real person behind an anonymous session
- It turns that identity into audiences you can actually act on, everywhere you sell
- It reports on the return of an audience across channels, not the return of one campaign in isolation.
This is what it is. The next section is how you build it.
The target audience playbook for eCommerce
Untitled works with over 500+ consumer brands and the agencies that power them. We’ve seen what happens when eCommerce brands adopt this playbook, whether it’s within Untitled or a DIY Modern Marketing Stack.
Seven steps, each useful on its own, mapped loosely to identify, connect, and then convert.
1. Identify the real person behind every session
Start with identity resolution, or the Untitled ID Tag, and turn anonymous store traffic into known people. Identification is where the work starts, but it’s the audience intelligence and target audience development that makes every step below work.
With website visitor identification tools, brands now have a way to separate the browsers from the buyers and turn those browsers into paying customers. This can be done with more advanced retargeting strategies in the channels you already run on.
By knowing who is visiting your website, you have a second opportunity to reach the once-hidden shopper and offer an incentive to push them over the finish line and convert.
2. Identify and read buyer intent data while it’s live
Leveraging buyer intent data has been a common marketing motion in B2B. With tools like Untitled, consumer brands now have an opportunity to leverage the same tactic in a B2C motion.
Untitled’s intent data allows you to search through 36,000+ topics that relate to your business category. You can generate in-market target audiences before these users ever visit your website or interact with your brand. This is an incredible way to find net-new buyers or get in front of people currently searching for your competitors.
From the audience intelligence side, you can also leverage intent data to see how many of the people on your site right now are actually in-market, not just window shopping. Knowing who is ready to buy changes what you do next, and it changes it before your competitor makes the same offer. You can set up all of these rules within Untitled’s customer segmentation feature.
3. Connect identity and buyer intent into a custom audience you can act on
Now, with Customer Segmentation in Untitled, you can shape known people into the groups that matter for your online store: new versus returning, high-AOV, category browsers, one-time buyers who never came back, or individuals picked up from the Untitled ID Tag, or those within a pulled intent audience.
If you’re assembling the target audience strategy in a DIY fashion, take these segments and upload them as custom audiences in Meta Ads, Google Ads and all the channels you run.
If you’re leveraging Untitled, use our integrations to sync these audience segments directly into your marketing channels.
4. Push those audiences where the selling happens
Connecting to the point above, using reverse ETL pushes audiences back into your marketing channels. Sync customer data in, enrich it with Untitled, and push it back out automatically to email and paid media, instead of exporting a CSV every Monday and hoping it’s still fresh by Wednesday.
From here, your marketing team takes control within your paid media channels.
Align creatives with the audience rules you’ve defined. Align the collection pages or product pages to connect to the audience signals you found, whether it’s from an identity resolution audience or a buyer intent segment.
5. Convert across every channel from one place with omnichannel marketing
Now, more than ever, it’s important to reach your audience wherever they may be.
For example, Connected TV (CTV) has become a crucial performance channel over the last decade. By 2028 CTV is projected to hit $46.89B and surpass traditional TV ad spending for the first time, with roughly $51B by 2029.
Reach the same target audience through email, through Native and CTV advertising on the Untitled DSP, and through Direct Mail Retargeting that reaches the right person within 48 hours of them leaving your site.
6. Suppress converted customers and win back lapsed customers
Advantage+ and Google AI-Max will continue to serve impressions to customers that already converted. These AI protocols waste ad spend by targeting bots. You can see it in Meta’s revenue over the last few quarters.
Stop paying to advertise to people who already bought, but deliberately re-engage the ones who lapsed.
Suppression quietly saves the spend you’re wasting on customers you already have; win-back goes after the revenue sitting in accounts that went cold. Almost everyone sells you the chase. Almost no one sells you the discipline of knowing when to stop chasing and when to return.
But Untitled does.
Within your audience settings in your Untitled account, set lookback windows and rules around when someone leaves the audience. For example, if you want to exclude Shopify buyers, create the rule. Once someone purchases, they will leave the audience and stop receiving ads.
This is the layer the point solutions leave you to assemble by hand. The Modern Marketing Stack allows you to reduce your wasted ad spend with paid media automation.
7. Measure ROAS by audience, not by campaign
If you’re running the motions correctly, you can now consider changing how you report return on ad spend. If you’ve adopted a true target audience strategy, you can now manage ROI at the audience level, rather than the channel level.
Use Audience ROI by Channels to report on what an audience returns across every marketing channel it touched, not what a single campaign returned in a vacuum.
That’s the number that tells you whether the audience strategy is working, and it’s the one your stack can’t produce today.
You could do some of this by hand. Here’s where it stops holding.
None of these steps are secrets. A sharp operator can approximate the shape of this manually. A pixel here. A segmentation hack in a spreadsheet. A CSV handed off to the mail vendor. For one store, one season, one person keeping it all in their head, it can even work for a while.
It stops holding as it scales, and it stops holding in a specific way.
Every new segment is another export. Every new channel is another integration nobody owns. And the audiences themselves go stale faster than you can maintain them by hand.
A cart-abandoner list is close to worthless in a week, a suppression list decays a little every single day, and intent is only useful while it’s live. The manual version isn’t wrong. It just quietly becomes a second job, and then it becomes nobody’s job, becoming a drawer of tools again.
Underneath all of it is the part that actually matters: a real shopper, and something relevant from your brand you’re trying to put in front of them at the moment it lands. That was always the whole job. It shouldn’t be this hard.
See the whole marketing motion with Untitled
The pieces here are real: the Untitled ID Tag, Intent Data, Customer Segmentation, Sync and Push, the Untitled DSP for Native and CTV, Direct Mail Retargeting, and Audience ROI by Channels. Bought one at a time, each is a tool.
Run together from one target audience platform, they’re the strategy you’ve waited for.
If you want to see this in action or see how brands have adopted Untitled, book a demo and we’ll walk the whole motion for your store, from the anonymous session to the audience, to the return on ad spend.
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