Having spent dollars on the marketing budget and getting no sales yet?
Ask yourself- Who are you targeting?
Often business owners reply vaguely to the question “everyone”, and if you are doing the same, you are targeting the wrong audience.
Due to broad targeting, marketing techniques don’t produce the desired results. Thus, instead of targeting everybody, target only the audience who want or need the product and would be interested in buying it.
For example: If you offer 100% guaranteed loans to everyone, you may not see any positive results. Someone having a poor credit score and seeking guaranteed approval loans prefers these loans. Therefore, the target audience should be poor credit consumers in an area or city for the best results and perfect targeting.
What is Strategic Audience Targeting?
Targeting in marketing is a strategy that breaks the audience into minor segments to consider and market to one segment at a time. By identifying the similarities between segments and serving that segment, a segment can be differentiated from another. Targeting is all about getting specific about your audience.
What are the types of Audience segmentation?
The 4 main types of audience segmentation are:
- Demographic: age, gender, education, marital status, race and religion
- Psychographic: Values, beliefs, interests, personality, and lifestyle
- Behavioural: Purchasing and spending habits, brand interactions, user status
- Geographical areas: neighbourhood, city, state, region, country
Furthermore, a business segmentation strategy examines factors such as a company’s size, industry, and revenue.
How To Target Audience for Rationalizing Marketing Goals?
Given these types of marketing segmentation, here is how you can achieve your marketing goals effectively:
1) Create a buyer persona
You can categorize your customers into defined audience sets when you know them deeply.
Map down your audience’s pain points, needs, wants, and obstacles to achieving those desires, and create a buyer persona.
- Demographics
- Values
- Professional goals
- Challenges
- Inspirational sources
- Buying decisions
Consider other aspects as well, including demographics and geographical areas listed earlier in the article for specialized targeting when creating a buyer persona.
While creating a buyer persona, don’t guess the details. Instead:
- Interview your existing customers
- Discuss the behavioral trends with your audience
- Track data on your sales systems
- Listen to the conversations online that customers have about your brand
You can target your marketing efforts to the right customers using real data.
2) Identify what your audience expects from you
You and marketers are the only ones who know your company’s goals, mission, and values. You don’t know that you exist and have a solution to their problem. Thus, before promoting your products, understand your customers well.
At the same time, make sure the message reflects the customer’s problems and provides a solution. Analyze which marketing strategies and messages customers may find offensive. Create messages that reveal the audience’s concerns and address any objections before they arise.
3) Are you targeting the audience on the right channels?
What is the best way to reach and attract your target audience?
Again, there is no one way to reach your target audience. You can just make a few efforts towards it, like targeting the audience where they are likely to stay. Identify the social media platforms they use the most.
For example, if you are a local business, you won’t launch an ad or organic marketing strategy targeting the entire city or the state. Instead, you will approach a directory or a small local newspaper, or use Facebook Ads to target a specific area. The maximum of your audience is on Facebook. Identify the message to attract those who will need your services. Analyze:
What channels does your audience use?
- Television
- Radio
- Blogs
- Webpages
- Online search campaigns
- Instagram ads
You want to make sure that your message reaches the right audience and is a part of the informational stream.
4) Measure the results of the campaign
Determine the audience is just the initial step. You can only determine whether you did so by observing the results of your campaign.
This is the twist each campaign you create by targeting the respective audience will open insights into recent stories, prompting you to re-target the audience and become more specific. Depending on the response and feedback, you can re-target your audience. This will help you get answers to the most complex questions, like target customers and the targeted market.
After you launch the product or services, it is critical to use the sales data and use customer surveys and other actions which may help you improve your marketing efforts and appeal to the targeted audience. Brands can continuously improve and innovate their offerings by measuring satisfaction.
Each target market needs to be addressed with a different strategy for the marketing campaign to be most effective.
5) Communicate with your target market
Marketers must communicate with the target market to reach their target audience. Businesses must know where and how to communicate with people. Apart from radio and television marketing, one-to-one interaction through seminars or webinars is the most impactful way to communicate with the target audience and listen to their conversations and queries.
6) Improve your marketing strategy by getting personalized
Now, when you know how to create a buyer persona and find opportunities in the market, let’s analyze how you can execute result-oriented marketing strategies based on it.
Here are two ways for perfect targeting and ensuring sales in the long run:
a) Message Communication
Improve your marketing messages by communicating in the language of your audience. For this, you need to understand your audience well. Speaking in their language will help them connect better with the brand. Therefore, when creating a landing page, webpage, or blog, use the language or phrases your audience uses most often.
b) Content Marketing
Produce targeted content by focusing on your audience’s interests and needs. Analyze what they search for online most of the time. Rather than creating generic blog posts or e-books, create content that truly interests your audience.
You can improve content marketing efforts by targeting their fears, desires, and wants in the content and paying for loans for bad credit, no guarantor and no fees from a direct lender for impactful paid marketing efforts and re-targeting.
c) Emails
Sending the right emails at the right time to the right targeted audience segment marketing is all about. Make use of the information that you have and outline their purchasing process. Help them on their journey to becoming a customer.
Marketing targeting improves results, increases customer satisfaction, and builds brand loyalty. And targeted marketing helps brands reach customers in the most meaningful way, eliminating the guessing game.