Identifying a clear target market for all marketing efforts is essential to growing your audience efficiently and receiving a high ROI on all campaigns. Why reach out to audiences that are too old or young to use your product, live in an area that can’t access your product or simply would have no interest? With 70 percent of branding professional placing audience growth as a major priority, it’s vital to specify a target market to see a quick and effective increase in following. If you’re at a loss as to how to accomplish this, take a look at these few quick tips.
1. Understand your audience
You can’t identify a target market without understanding the nuances between each segment — age groups, interests, socio-economic influences and occupations. Take a good look at your company and product, and conduct the appropriate market research to get an understanding of each segment and how they function.
From there, it should be relatively straightforward as to what segments fit well with your brand and product offerings. As soon as a target market is identified, it is the marketer’s job to understand everything about them — what do they do for work, what hobbies do they enjoy, what platforms do they engage in, how often do they engage in conversions, etc.
These are just some examples of the data marketers should be collecting on a regular basis to really understand how their audiences operate. This data is then great to apply to your campaigns, influencing the content and execution of all marketing efforts.
2. Create targeted content
Each marketing campaign has a purpose. Before starting any campaign, it’s vital to understand this goal and know what steps need to be taken to get there. Creating custom content for each campaign is one of the most important steps of an effective marketing campaign that actually reaches your target audience and delivers a solid return on investment.
A worldwide leader in direct sales, Amway, for example, has taken measures to dispell the Amway pyramid scheme myth. The company created a marketing campaign focused on outlining their business in detail and explaining that Independent Business Owners (IBO’s) only earn income when products are sold and don’t earn a single cent from recruiting.
As such, they created blog articles that provided a step-by-step overview of their company, which reached audiences and ultimately solidified the Amway brand. For any campaign, focus first on what you’re trying to achieve, and then adjust the content’s message and platform to ensure you achieve this goal.
3. Always change And optimize
People are constantly changing. Whether it’s their socio-economic status, interests or new technologies or platforms that emerge — their habits, lifestyle and preferences are constantly growing and adjusting. As a marketer, it’s important to stay on top of these changes to ensure that your work doesn’t become outdated, and thus your targeting ineffective. For each campaign, research and data pulling should be conducted before identifying a final target audience and campaign plan.
Throughout each campaign, optimizations should also be done to ensure the campaign is performing at its best, and your maximum return on investment is achieved. Overall, being up-to-date on new technologies, marketing strategies and the work of your competitors is important for staying relevant and visible.
Having a target audience and custom content to suit this following is an important step that all marketers and branding experts should take to be successful. Follow these quick tips to get a better understanding of what this process involves, and notice the increase in the efficiency of your campaigns.