Where you live, work and play all determine your purchase behaviors. For example, while some people may flock to their favorite gourmet coffee shop to get their morning fix, others are seeking out the lower price and increased accessibility of a cup of coffee from the local convenience store on their daily commute.

In an effort to increase the efficiency of advertising campaigns while also saving precious brand dollars, online advertising networks now have the capability to precisely target specific segments of consumers. Why advertise your mom-and-pop coffee shop to the entire country when you can advertise right to your friendly neighbors who are most likely to frequent the shop?

To better understand how target marketing works in the realm of online video advertising, here are three tools you can utilize:

Geotargeting

In the past, television has dominated the advertising game because of the appeal of video. As of late, the digital realm has become a threat to television because like TV, online video ads employ sight, sound and motion while also offering the competitive advantage in it’s ability to target and measure viewer engagement. Another huge asset of online advertising is the capability to narrow down your audience geographically. You wouldn’t want to play television ads in California for your coffee shop that’s located in Chicago. Thanks to the specificity of the digital advertising ecosystem, advertisers can decide to spread their reach as broad as the entire country or as distinct as a block or street corner.

Third Party Data Segmentation

When narrowing down your target market, it is important to specify who your consumers are based on their existing consumption patterns. By utilizing third party data, you can funnel your audience from the entire country to neighborhoods and communities. What exactly is third party data? It is the information that can be collected about website visitors that can then be used to create detailed profiles, or segments, that differentiate users’ tastes and behaviors as they navigate around the Internet. By meshing this in-depth consumer information with precise geographic targeting, advertisers can ensure their valuable impressions are not being wasted on the wrong audience.

Retargeting

Now that you’ve segmented your hyper-specific target market, how are you going to get those potential customers to come back for more? With online video advertising, you can monitor who is viewing your advertisements, how much of the video they are actually seeing, and who is clicking through to your website. By keeping track of who these unique visitors are, advertisers can follow their trail through the web in order to place their ads on other premium sites and bring them back to your site from anywhere on the web by retargeting your video advertisement.

By creatively blending third party data segmentation with geotargeting and retargeting technologies, advertisers now have the power to mold and optimize their campaigns to best suit their target market. By showing your ads to people who are coffee drinkers living within 5 miles of your shop, and who have already paid a visit to your website, your advertising will be more effective than ever before. Not using digital advertising? Wake up and smell the coffee.