Why Defining Your Target Audience is the Essential Step Towards Marketing Success
Businesses need to throw out the old idea that creating more traffic to their sites equals success. It’s actually about getting the people to your website who want to buy what you are selling. If you are not going after the right people, you are just wasting your time and money.
Defining your target audience is the first and most essential step towards success.
When you can answer: what the age, gender, education level, purchasing power, social class, location, and buying habits of your audience, you will increase your reach and your profits rather than trying to reach everyone and wasting your money in doing so.
The answers will not only guide you to a clearer understanding of who your audience is but how to better create customized content that will get them to act.
And the more granular you can get about the habits of your audience, the better (personal characteristics, purchasing power, lifestyle, interests, engagement in social networks, and professional information) you can carve your audience segment so much that you define a persona and can be more intentional about what you say.
In addition to the market research, the clearest buyer personas are based on insights a company collects from their actual readership through surveys, interviews, etc.
Mom and Dad Money get right to this information through their basic-designed email communications. Reading just like a message you would get from a friend or colleague, they ask for a quick favor and follow up with a thank you that includes a lot of advice and links to resources specifically catered to your answers. Proving an impressive dedication to their readers.
By making your content more personalized and attractive for your consumer, you garner greater success of seeing them down your sales funnel. You understand the type of communication your buyers want and how and how often how to reach them.
Zipcar, for example, learned that their primary buyer persona is the millennial urban dweller, so their services are typically offered in large cities around the world, with high populations of millennials who either can’t afford a car or don’t see the need to own one in the city. With its sharing-focused business model, users pay hourly or daily rates to use a communal car without having to worry about paying for things like gas and insurance.
When you look at the channels and tone that Zipcar uses in its marketing, it is evident that this audience is who they’re targeting. Just look at this tweet aimed at the millennial world traveler, for instance:
Hubspot provides an example of a great digital marketing campaign when they wanted to target marketers from small- to medium-sized businesses on LinkedIn. To do so, they created sponsored content to appear alongside their target audience’s newsfeed. The initiative allowed them to both inform their clients as well as bring in new leads.
The results were 400% more leads with their target audience than other platforms. They were also able to gain instant insights on what was working and what they needed to tweak for their next campaign.
On average, segmented campaigns result in 23% higher open rates and 49% higher click-through rates than unsegmented campaigns.
With 58% of content marketers reporting that audience relevance was the biggest contributor to success, the greatest way to stand out is by creating unique content relevant to your target audience’s needs.
When you can create content that fits your target audience’s unique needs, they will develop trust and familiarity with your brand, which can reduce your marketing costs while bringing in more sales and profit.
Altice’s Work from Home Email Campaign effectively identified and tailored messaging during the accelerated rate at which the pandemic spurred businesses to shift to work-at-home models.This campaign’s success, achieving a 65% CTR, is credited mainly to the Bloom team and Altice’s teams’ initial understanding about the customers being targeting. We helped connect the solutions and services that best aligned with the needs of the customers.
Let us know if you need help in creating audience-centered content that reaches the right people so you gain more traction and engagement.
