How do you target the right customers online?
Without a way to target customers, your digital marketing efforts may be wasted. Are you getting the most out of your marketing investment? Targeting presents an easy solution to lower the cost of lead acquisition online.
SEO is not all about keywords. You must set a target in place in order for search engine optimization to work to your advantage. By focusing in on a specific audience, you cut the excess effort wasted on those who don’t qualify to be sold your products or services.
Here are some things you need to target customers:
Brand Identity
First, in order to target the right people, you need to adjust your approach. To make a great first impression on the right audience, develop a “brand identity” that speaks to your best customers. Is there something your best customers all have in common? If so, make use of these characteristics to create a “personality” for your company in the form of a brand. Your brand should speak directly to your intended customers and continuously manifest as the mode of your business operations in the form of posts, web content, and visuals in which constantly reinforce the desired outcome. This helps your audience remember what you do and why they need you, which sets them up for a more “comfortable” sale.
Buyer Persona
Now that you have your own brand personality down, it’s time to figure out the “persona” of your customers. Targeting customers can be executed in a much more effective manner if you can narrow the personality of your best customers down to a few “buyer personas”. With buyer personas, you must take into consideration the mindset of your customer:
- Which problems do your products/services help solve?
- What are your customer’s main challenges?
- How do they identify with your brand?
- What are their interests?
- How do they shop?
A buyer persona for a toy company is obviously going to be much different than that of a law firm. By comparing two completely unrelated companies, you can see the obvious characteristics of your own company’s buyer persona. After doing this, fine-tune your own buyer persona by comparing the “flavor” of your company’s offerings with that of a competitor.
What makes customers choose you instead of them? Find a way to work this into your buyer persona in the form of a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) that speaks to your customers.
Customer Demographics Analysis
Believe it or not, demographics can be very telling for targeting purposes. Some companies can immediately eliminate half the population from their target audience because they design products and services for a specific gender. In addition, imagine how much variation exists between the values of Americans who live in each state. Although there are plenty of similarities across the US population, just your immediate location has the potential to affect your need for a particular company’s business.
For instance, warm southern states that reach close into the subtropic zones would have less of a market for clothing, goods, and tools needed for the cold winter months. Therefore, demographics provide an excellent tool to analyze the background of your audience and form a better customer targeting strategy.
Lead Tracking and Reporting
One of the most effective ways to guarantee you are targeting the right people and getting the most out of your marketing investment is by tracking the source of leads. Through marketing automation software and “big data” reporting plugins, you can track the origin of leads to get a better understanding of which pages and profiles work best in promoting your business. This helps you develop more effective ways to direct your marketing investment.
In addition, many marketing software offer lead scoring and nurturing to target actual leads and assess the quality or buyer potential using a measurable scale. This makes it much easier to develop a lead-scoring strategy and discern which leads you should spend the most time with during lead nurturing.
Need help reaching the right audience and targeting customers?
We can provide your business with a targeting strategy. Learn more about our marketing programs and contact Oyova — a St. Petersburg web design, content marketing, social media management, and eCommerce web development company.