How effective are your advertisements? Guide to go directly to the buyers.

In Nigeria, there is a large population of over 150million people. A majority of these people are young people between the ages of 16 and 35. These statistics appear to be run of mill and flat or even boring until you use the information for marketing of goods for this group of people. We can stretch this analysis further and say a majority of this group of youths which could number at 75million people or more use the internet frequently. The knowledge becomes even more useful in the sense that any group, organization or company that is involved in marketing products or services for the youth in Nigeria ought to have a presence on the internet to facilitate their promotional activity! 
There comes a time when you are tempted to ask yourself if the promotions or advertising you have put out in the crowd is actually producing the sales that you want. The audience in marketing today is so sophisticated that just dumping an advertisement in any media will not do. Moreover, nobody can actually boast that they have unlimited resources for advertising, so we ought to plan our budgets, the dimension of our advertisements and the media we are choosing as a vehicle for advertising.
The basic rule is for the company or organization that is promoting the product to know its customers very well so that it can know how to target them. What we are saying is that we should engage in understanding our customers, their tastes, preferences, age ranges, educational background and locations. Mind you we are not saying know everything about them but customer service people work with trends which enable them to understand and plan their adverts properly. For instance the job market, people who are looking for employment might focus on newspapers that have a bias for head hunting and vacancy advertising but when the costs come into consideration, the online media is more cost effective on the long run.
As a marketer of products once you find where your audience is, the next question you ought to ask yourself is which media is the best to address this group of people and how can I do it with maximum effect but minimal cost? These questions would help us narrow down our waste and focus sharply on the interest group we have in mind.
What if we have been using  the right media; (we know for sure that our audience patronizes that media) and we are still not getting the right results? Perhaps that is when we need to take a look at the copy! Sometimes changing words around helps to achieve the right results. At other times it could be colors, design or location of the advertisement. The location here refers to placement, where to put the ad. If you are addressing women who are tending to young children and spend a lot of time at home, you might have to consider putting the advertisement on television, close to a soap opera, in the market place, at religious gatherings that women frequent or hairdressing salons. If we want an immediate result, sometimes we have to go directly to the places where our audience is located, so that we can get immediate responses.
Even for the cyber audience, we ought to be able to analyze and determine where exactly our audience is on the internet. Do our buyers or target market frequent: Wassup, Facebook, Twitter, Linnkedin or Google+? If they do, what are their behaviors online? Do they have icons or influencers who they follow? If they do who are these people and how can we reach them? There are  many questions we ought to ask ourselves; for instance, what are the likes and dislikes of our audience? Young men within the age range of 16 and 35 would like football and other competitive sports. The ladies in that age category would like fashion, beauty, hairstyles and perhaps romantic ventures. Captivating content is one of the backbones of winning customers online. In the final analysis, the bottom line is if we target our audience appropriately, promoting our products or services comes easily.