Before the growth of SEO and social media, companies relied on market research to understand their customers. Sadly, only the Fortune 1000 companies were able to afford such campaigns.
But, those days are long gone, and the digital age offers a lot of tools and platforms to target your customers. Now, both small and large businesses can compete on the same level to target the same pool of customers. But how exactly can you target your specific audience?
In this post, we’re going to share a straightforward secret to successful audience targeting.
Read on to learn more.
Start with a Buyer Persona
If you’re trying to launch a content marketing, paid advertising, or social media campaign, you shouldn’t start before learning more about your typical customer. You can personalize your campaigns and boost your ROI just by taking the time to understand your audience.
This is where a buyer persona comes in handy. Essentially, it allows you to create a fictional character of your ideal customer. For example, if it’s a B2B campaign, you want to look at the industry, job position, company size, revenue, and location of your client. For B2C marketing, essential considerations are income, age, gender, and relationship status. Others include language, education, and location.
You should also consider other elements such as interests, hobbies, and purchasing decisions. Pay attention to both psychographic and demographic factors to learn more about your ideal customer. Keep in mind that personas change and evolve, so your expectations should be flexible.
As you learn more, always go back and re-define your ideal customer to ensure your audience targeting is sound and up-to-date.
Use Your Existing Data
If you’ve been using tools, such as Facebook and Google Analytics, you have lots of data. Use it understand how your audience is finding your business. It will also give you some great insights into the type of content that your audience like and how they’re engaging with it.
Ideally, you want to analyze your current customers to understand their age, income, profession, gender, and interests. Identify all the platforms that are actively bringing in new customers. For example, if it’s social media, analyzing your audience will help you know when most of them are online.
Also, Google Analytics has “audience” and “demographics” tabs that give you access to your traffic data. You can see your traffic by age and gender. Under “interests,” you’ll find other metrics that you can use to streamline and improve your marketing strategy.
Here, your goal is to target the right audience, boost your closing rates, and reduce the time taken to make sales. Your existing data is actually a gold mine that you can use to steer your business in the right direction. It’s quite important during the customer research portion of your campaign.
Spy On Your Competitors
Identify all competitors that are performing strongly and determine what they’re doing differently to earn clients and results. You want to know how they are ranking at the top of SERPs for the keywords you’re actually targeting, too. Also, how much can you learn from their social media activity?
Look at their LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook pages to see how they’re engaging their audience. With the right marketing research, you’ll be able to know the techniques that your competitors are using. You can adopt them and improve them to scale your campaigns and ensure effective audience targeting.
Personalize Your Message
At this point, you understand your ideal customer, and you’ve collected enough data to go on. You should now focus on creating a compelling message that resonates with your audience. Keep in mind that one size does not fit all. So, personalization is an essential element of creating proper marketing messages.
The purpose of any online marketing campaign is to make the most of every buck you spend. A message that relates and resonates with your marketing is the best approach to audience targeting.
Use your buyer persona profile and data insights to enhance your message for better engagement. Don’t forget to use their interests and preferences to make your campaigns quite impactful. For example, if you learned that those who clicked your ads love pets or outdoor activities, use such interests in your message.
A/B Testing
Also known as split testing, A/B testing is simply a method for comparing two versions of an ad or web page to see which performs better than the other. So, once you have created your ad, message or campaign, you should carry out the test to determine the relevancy and likeability of your campaign.
For example, when using Facebook advertising, you can use different headlines, images, and links on your ads. Try changing the text, colors, and call to action to determine the ones that attract more clicks. You can also try various offers, such as free shipping, a dollar amount off, a percentage off or discounts limited to specific products.
The goal here is to find out which ad details are likely to pique the interest of your audience. When testing offers, there are various metrics you need to consider, such as units per transaction (UPT), gross revenue, profit margin, and average order volume (AOV).
Also, remember to take the time to analyze and interpret the results of the test. This can be quite challenging as different metrics can be conflicting.
Audience Targeting – The Bottom Line
Identifying and targeting the right audience helps to improve your conversion rates. Over time, you’ll notice an increase in sales. You need to invest time in learning your customers to create and personalize campaigns that will actually intrigue them.
Audience targeting involves learning and leveraging potential opportunities. This helps to create a smooth process that will facilitate more leads through your sales funnel. Engage your niche audience effectively and try to communicate in their own language. Most importantly, you want to support their interests and moods.
Do you have any question of identifying and targeting the right audience? Feel free to get in touch with us, and we’ll be glad to help.