No matter how good your product or service is, it won’t be for everyone. While you may think it’s the latest, greatest thing to enter the marketplace, there will be individuals who don’t need it or want it. Knowing this, it’s crucial to understand your target audience and how best to reach them.
Great marketing takes precision and accuracy into account. Without precision, you are wasting your time, effort, and money on ads that aren’t relevant to the individual seeing them. And without accuracy, you aren’t leveraging the platforms that your audience is most interested in. Below are four tips for hitting the bullseye when it comes to targeting the right audience for your brand.
1. Rely on Data-Driven Methods
Data is here to stay in terms of audience targeting. As the third-party cookie depreciates, it’s more important than ever to understand what kinds of learnings you can gain. Many brands have relied on third-party cookies as a targeting solution. Knowing what customers have searched for in the past, offers a lot of information. While you may be mourning the loss of this advertising solution, there are newer methods that will enhance how you think about your marketing models.
One of these newer replacement solutions is predictive audiences — audience segments using AI and machine learning to make predictions on future current behaviors and trends. With predictive audiences, you can build audience segments based on when a customer will likely purchase. By looking at the data, these segments will be derived from how often a user has clicked on your site, whether they’ve signed up for your newsletter, and more. Tapping into this newer solution is one way to get a leg up on your competition while continuing to market to your specific audience.
2. Know Your Competition
Speaking of competition, it would be remiss not to know who you’re up against. Before starting a sporting match, athletes and teams analyze who their opponents are. Depending on the sport, they’ll look at old videotapes to see how the individual player or team moves. They will look at records as well as assess their strategies. This type of practice should be common for you in the business world too, especially for analyzing your top competitors.
Knowing your competition will vary based on your goals. From a content perspective, doing keyword research and getting a sense of what they’re ranking for can help with your content plan. And, from a social perspective, see how they’re engaging with their followers and commenters. Are there questions or complaints that are unaddressed? If so, this may be an area that you can hone in on to foster a more authentic and engaged community across your social platforms.
By truly knowing your competition, you’ll be able to better engage with and target your audience. You may find some similarities as well as noticeable differences between your demo and that of your competitors. Take this into consideration as you launch a campaign. Think of how you can stand out and how you need to differentiate yourself to attract new consumers and maintain current ones. Doing so will help you decide which marketing strategies to utilize and which will help set you apart from the competition.
3. Strike a Chord
Consumers are not robots; they are real people with real interests and needs. Remembering this fact is important when you’re defining and refining your target audience. It’s important to pause, take a step back, and evaluate what your audience is looking for. Go deep to understand their behaviors, and figure out what’s challenging them regularly. If your product or service can address this pain point, be sure to advertise it as the solution.
One effective strategy to infuse a human-like element into your campaigns is to analyze past audience trends. For example, if you discover that your customers are passionate about entertaining and cooking, your new creative content should reflect these interests. You could incorporate imagery of dinner parties, videos demonstrating cooking techniques, or copy that narrates a story about hosting a memorable event. This approach is beneficial even if your business isn’t directly related to the food industry. By aligning your service with these themes, you can broaden your appeal to new audiences who share these interests.
4. Gather and Utilize Customer Feedback
As you begin to see the types of marketing campaigns that excite your audience and drive the most leads, you’ll want to gather feedback. Customer feedback is direct intel into your target audience. It’s a powerful tool that many marketers may think is a huge project and a waste of time. But with newer tools available today, getting feedback is easier than ever.
You can conduct surveys on your site, relying on survey builders to do the hard work of crafting questions and initiating for you. There are also platforms available to help analyze reviews, whether they’re on your brand’s website or a third-party site such as Amazon or Target. And, of course, since social media is a way consumers connect directly with brands, there are tools to gain insights and feedback from these platforms.
More important than collecting this feedback is analyzing it. You will likely notice some patterns or trends that you can dive into. Perhaps there is a product that isn’t performing as well long-term. Maybe customers are confused by how the product works or what its full capabilities are. These insights that identify your audience’s pain points can shape future marketing and campaign strategies.
Conclusion
Just like in a game of darts, hitting the bullseye for your audience targeting isn’t easy, but it’s possible. Take these tips into consideration as you build out your marketing strategy. Doing so will help you stay on track and continue to evolve as a brand.
