It is crucial that you conduct your business with your customer in mind. A key to your business’ success is knowing who your customers are and taking that knowledge of them into consideration when you’re determining which course of marketing is going to be the most effective to drive more customers to your business.
In this post, we’ll unravel how this knowledge is influential to the success of your marketing.
Who Are The People That Make Up Your Business’ Target Market?
A major issue for many businesses is that they are not effectively targeting their marketing to the people who are the most like to purchase their products. Having a good reason to believe a consumer is likely to engage with your business before you spend money to place your advertisement in front of them is essential to getting a reasonable return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
This may start out feeling like guess work, but there are many ways to determine who are your target consumers. Many times, a good starting point is to look at other businesses in a similar market and examine statistical data. After determining what may be relevant to your business and make conclusions about how your marketing may be similar or different. Doing research about a certain type of marketing is helpful, because it will prepare you for the challenges that you may have to overcome in your marketing campaigns. Regarding online, there are countless analytics tools that can give you insights into who your customers are, and how they’re interreacting with your website.
The more you can focus on a very precise audience, the more successful you will be. Attempting to appeal to everyone will likely waste your ad budget on people who aren’t interested in your product and are unlikely to ever make a purchase from you.
Whether your business has a very specific target market, or a very broad one, standing out to consumers among the noise takes something special. Being successful in a niche is an accomplishment that is often accompanied with challenges and requires discipline in marketing strategy and operations. Knowing who your consumer is and how to speak to them is crucial to your marketing success.
Applying Your Knowledge to Your Marketing
Once you’ve collected information on your consumers, the next step is interpretation of the data. It’s important to try to determine what characteristics are in your current customers, so that you can target prospective customers with those characteristics. Additionally, it is valuable to understand who your customers are that have the greatest customer-lifetime-value (CLV). Follow up with them & continuously market to them. Maintaining a relationship with your customers is a secret to success in marketing. Your business will likely have a better ROAS if the marketing is more aggressively targeted people with the characteristics of those customers with the highest CLV.
Use your knowledge of your consumer to find ways to more effectively solve their problem and provide your product/service to them in a more valuable manner. Crafting your business with the consumer’s interests in mind creates a better customer-business relationship and leads to more value being created for both the customer and the business.
When choosing an advertising medium, it’s essential to consider the placement of your advertising, and whether that’s reaching your target consumers effectively.
When it comes to direct-response marketing, it’s especially imperative to know that you’re reaching the right people. This can be accomplished in many ways, depending on which marketing medium is used. For example, if you want to make sure your direct mail campaign is as effective as possible, you’ll want to choose a reliable list provider and effectively determine which filter criteria is relevant to your business.
When running an online advertising campaign, i.e. search advertising, display advertising, or social/in-stream, the success of your campaign can rely heavily on your ability to effectively do pre-emptive research, and determine which filter criteria, medium of transmission, and the presentation of your advertisement are going to result in the highest ROAS gained from the marketing campaign. Some advertising mediums will provide more valuable impressions of your ads, while others will produce less valuable impressions or low-quality response – either in response rate or results of customer interaction after the initial connection. Every business is going to have unique results from each form of advertising, and it is going to take the interpretation and application of data and knowledge, or trial-and-error (which can get expensive when there’s more errors than successes) for you to know which mediums are the most practical for your business.
For smaller businesses, whose short-term survival relies on always having an acceptable (or even positive) ROAS from their marketing, broad forms marketing probably shouldn’t be a priority at first. Broad forms of advertising should likely be a secondary, complimentary focus in your marketing, used as a means to strengthen your brand awareness in the marketplace. Doing broad forms of advertising without having first established a few effective, targeted marketing campaigns is likely not going to be the best course of action.
Doing a broad form of marketing (tv, billboards, etc.) is still an important piece of marketing because it builds consumer awareness of your brand or product in your marketplace. Having strong brand awareness brings in the customers that you wouldn’t have normally reached with targeted, direct marketing, and creates consumer trust in your business. This is a process that takes time and persistence. Fostering this trust and awareness through broader forms of marketing and PR is something that creates great value for your business, even though it may not always be readily apparent. That’s why companies who are household names spend millions on running television commercials. With as many forms of marketing available to business today, running television ads can seem expensive, and ineffective, especially if the response doesn’t bring in a good ROAS, but it still adds strength to your brand that is not obtained otherwise. Every business is different, and it’s up to the people in the organization to determine when it would be most reasonable for these forms of advertising to be implemented.
Keep Track of What’s Working and What Isn’t
It’s important to remember that it’s okay (and a valuable dataset) to ask your customers for their feedback on what form of marketing spoke to them and brought them to you. Determining your ROAS for a specific form of advertising can be much easier if your customers are telling you how they heard about you. Finding out what you’re doing that has successfully peaked interest in customers and brought them in is an important piece of successful marketing. You probably won’t get every customer to tell you, but every bit of data helps you to make a more informed decision when you’re deciding which marketing campaigns to ramp up and which ones to shut down.
Furthermore, having specific tracking phone numbers for each form of advertising can make determining what’s working less difficult and more accurate. It takes the guesswork out of figuring out which marketing campaigns are successfully bringing in customers and can make it especially easier when running multiple different mediums of advertising concurrently.
You could even consider have a deeper level of sophistication by having multiple tracking numbers within each form of advertisement. For example, you’re running a TV commercial for your business, and putting up billboards. The commercial is broadcast to a large area, but each billboard can only be seen from a certain area or neighbourhood. Having different local tracking numbers for the TV spot and the billboards can tell you which one is more effective in your market, but you will obtain even more targeting data if you chose to have one tracking number for the billboards in one neighbourhood of town, and a different number for another.
In Conclusion
The world is a big place. Not everybody is going to be interested in your product/service. Having targeted marketing campaigns means you won’t be paying to place your ad in front of people who don’t care. This will bring your customer acquisition cost down, causing your campaign to provide more results without increasing ad spend, therefore making your business more profitable.
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