Every product or service needs to be marketed to one or more particular audiences. It can often be difficult to determine which audiences to market to and how best to market to them, so here are seven tips for marketing to specific audiences.
1. Generate leads
Lead generation is one of the key ways to target your marketing to specific audiences. Lead generation is basically how you engage with your customers and build relationships. There are several different types of leads you should seek to generate, including new, working and nurturing.
- New leads are customers who are encountering your brand for the first time, such as those first walking into your store or visiting your website.
- Working leads are current, active customers.
- Nurturing leads are customers who are may not currently interested but might be at some point, so they are leads you should stay in touch with, for example, via email lists.
2. Create customer personas
A customer or buyer persona is a method of putting a face to your target audience. You should create a customer persona for any and all target audiences you’re considering. These personas act as the ideal customer of each target audience. You can design the persona to include the most common interests, likes, dislikes and goals of that target audience, use it to consider that audience’s purchasing habits and problems this audience may be experiencing.
3. Conduct market research
Whatever target audience you’re seeking to market to, you need to conduct market research to understand it as well as you can. Once you understand your target audience, you’ll have a better grasp on what that audience needs, the audience’s makeup and how it relates to your product and your greater market, and also ensuring your audience isn’t too niche or too broad.
4. Perform market segmentation
Once you have conducted your market research, you’ll need to perform market segmentation. Segmentation will enable you to make more accurate customer personas. You can also use the segmentation to conduct better analysis and develop more accurate audience insights. To segment an audience, you should consider the demographics of your market, including income, age, gender, and geographic location. You should further segment according to profession, common purchasing habits, hobbies, needs, education, marital status, religion, attitudes, political leanings and other aspects of personalities and interests.
5. Select the segments with the most potential
Conducting a market segmentation can help you select the best segments to market to. Marketing well requires you to choose the audience segments that are most likely to be interested in and purchase your product or service. Think about what each segment is and isn’t. Does the segment’s interest and type align with your needs for your marketing or not? Then, assess each segment’s potential reactions to your product, service and all of the potential marketing strategies you’re considering for that product or service. You should choose the segments with the most potential and the marketing strategies that will work best to attract those segments.
6. Study current data
One of the best strategies for targeting specific markets is to study current data. This data can contribute to your market research and to your creation of market and audience segments and customer personas. It will also help you understand greater trends in your market or industry. You can go back through your company’s own history regarding website traffic, sales records, the popularity of certain products or services and past profit margins. You can also study the results of your competitors.
Compare your strategies and target markets to those of companies selling similar products or services. Think about what you’re doing similarly and differently and the differences between the times or numbers of customers you and your competitors are attracting. Why are there differences? What’s causing those differences? You can use this data to determine whether there’s an issue with a product, a marketing campaign or a chosen target audience. You can also use it to further improve your offerings and marketing if it’s already doing well.
7. Conduct predictive analytics
Predictive analytics goes hand-in-hand with studying current data. You can put the data through an analytics program, such as Google Analytics, and create predictive models of future sales, developing marketing campaigns and potential target markets or audiences. These programs can create insights which can give you a solid idea of how your strategies will perform based on current data. You should keep these insights for future data and continually track data and perform subsequent analytics. This will enable you to go back and review the data and models in the future and create new models to compare them to.
It’s vital to your company that you select the correct target audiences to market to. Marketing to the most appropriate argument audience is one of the best ways to ensure that your product or service sells effectively and you make a profit from those sales.
