Knowing your target audience is an essential first step in crafting a marketing strategy. Customers respond best to a product that solves a problem or meets a need. Identifying that problem or need will vary from person to person, meaning there’s not a one-size-fits-all marketing message to suit all your customers.
Drilling down into your overall customer base to find a specific target group makes marketing dollars and efforts more efficient and effective.
So what’s the best way to use the market to the right target audience? Here are a few tips.
Track Customer Information
Business can choose their target audiences across dimensions, from demographic factors like age and location, to purchase history, to communication preferences. The best way to keep an accurate record of all that information for every one of your customers is a robust customer relationship management, or CRM, system. Recording customer data is one of the many benefits of crm. The best systems allow businesses to build a customer profile that includes current contact information, communication preferences, buying behaviors, customer service interactions and purchase history. Everyone on your team has access to the same set of data, meaning customer service representatives can pick up support tickets without interruption, and sales representatives can find the most promising prospects.
Use Data to Drive Marketing
With all the information available in an updated CRM database, companies are able to target marketing messages to the right audience. Say, for example, you want to send a sales promotion to customers in a specific location who have made a purchase in the past six months. You can pull a report on those customers from your CRM system, then email only to that audience. The best CRM platforms will either integrate with your email system or come with their own email marketing features, making this connection even more seamless. You’ll be able to see who opened the sales email, who clicked on it and who followed it all the way through to a purchase. That information provides powerful insights into customer behavior. It also allows you to target and automate follow-up messages to people who may have clicked through the first email but didn’t buy anything.
Take Advantage of Automation
Many CRM-connected email systems offer automation features that help with marketing. When a new customer signs up for your email list, consider sending an automated series of email messages to increase their knowledge of and loyalty to your brand. A cheery welcome message starts things off, followed by a few informational or sales messages over the next 4-6 weeks. Automation allows for consistent communication to this targeted group of new customers who haven’t made it all the way through the sales funnel just yet.
Target Through Paid Social
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have powerful advertising tools that allow for intensive targeting and segmentation. Businesses can upload customer email lists to Facebook to create their own custom audiences or build look-alike groups with similar interests and characteristics. There’s an enormous amount of information available on social platforms to develop a target audience, from geographic location to music taste to purchasing behavior to personal hobbies. Once you’ve outlined the target audience for a new product, pair an email marketing campaign to your current contacts with a paid social media campaign to the same audience. You’ll be able to attract new customers with similar traits, then follow up with them through remarketing and other targeting tools.
Keep Customers Coming Back
Once a customer visits your website, make sure you stay in touch. A CRM system connected to your email platform can do this through automated followup messages or reminders about items a customer left in their shopping cart. You can also set up re-marketing campaigns to serve digital display and social media ads to customers who have visited a specific page on your website. Don’t let a potential sales lead go cold – use technology to stay top-of-mind.
