Don’t Waste Your Marketing Dollars: Know Your Audience
Companies have been frequently shown to throw large amounts of money into their marketing efforts. An estimated $628.62 billion was spent on advertising in 2018 alone.
Sadly, most of this ad spend ends up going to waste due to marketing teams relying on old, outdated, and harmful marketing practices. In fact, in a survey conducted by Rakuten Marketing, marketing teams estimated that they waste about 26 percent of their marketing budget on ineffective strategies.
Wasted marketing revenue is a common occurrence in the industry. However, that shouldn’t be the case and you don’t have to waste your marketing dollars on ineffective strategies until you finally reach one that works.
There is a lot that can be done to spare your organization the pains of running an unsuccessful marketing campaign and it starts with targeting the right audience. The more you understand your audience, the stronger your marketing efforts will become in the right direction.
The crux of any effective marketing campaign is to recognize the type of audience your business attracts. That includes everything from geographic and demographic variables to the opinions, interests, and personality traits of your audience.
Traditional vs Digital Marketing: Difference in Audience Then and Now
Adopting change is an undeniable part of every business. The ability to keep track of those changes and apply them to your marketing model is crucial for the success of any organization.
The needs and wants of customers of today's digital marketing era have changed from those of before. In today's end-user era, where the individual user largely decides what they want instead of corporate, trends are shifting. End users of any product or service are constantly changing in location, requirements, and even numbers.
Today, people are more interested in the actual use of a service or product rather than its ownership. This trend affects the way products are marketed now.
As opposed to the traditional marketing era, people’s tastes are now more varied and demanding. The customer is more dominant now and that has resulted in increasingly segmented sales potentials.
This means that digital marketing efforts cannot follow the same model as they did before where they tried to figure out their “average customer” and designed their service/product around that.
An “average customer” does not exist anymore. Now, companies have to be more specific in their marketing efforts while staying alert to their customers’ changing needs.
How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy by Knowing Your Audience Better
Conduct Market Research on Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the base on which your marketing model stands on. Understanding your target audience is crucial which is why you need to conduct efficient research on your intended customer.
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience is the potential customer who will require your services or products. These are the people who are most likely to benefit from what you have to offer and consequently, reach out to you and become a customer.
The following aspects should form a part of your target audience research-
Specific, Not General
There is a product for every need now. In today's market, aiming your service at a generalized portion of the population just won't work.
Instead of trying to undertake the impossible task of pleasing everyone, you need to figure out your specific target audience and stick to serving that group of customers only. Your target audience should be specific, not general.
Data-backed Decision-Making
There is no room for intuition and assumptions in marketing towards a targeted audience. Data should be frequently relied on, if not always, to determine your next marketing move.
Customer-centric Approach
If your business does not provide a genuine benefit to the end user, you are going to get replaced by someone better. Your marketing campaign should have a customer-centric approach towards its potential customers by engaging with them actively and putting their needs first.
Why You Need to Create a Specific Target Audience
Boosting Your Marketing Efforts
Knowing your target audience will help narrow down where your efforts need to go and where changes need to be made. You will be better able to utilize channels and messaging platforms to which your potential customers would respond well.
You will also be able to create a brand personality, providing your customers with a sense of belonging.
Efficient Product Development
Understanding your audience would help you design your products and services based around their specific needs. You would be better able to understand what needs are unmet with your particular audience as well as the environment your product should be sold in.
This will help you reach your potential customers’ demands more efficiently.
Better Business Strategy
Knowing your target audience is going to help you adjust your overall business strategy to suit your customers.
This could affect things like day-to-day business operations to how tasks are distributed amongst teams to best meet the needs of the audience. Creating a business strategy with your customer at the center is going to bring in more customer retention and loyalty.
How to Research Your Audience
To research your audience, you need to first ask and find the answers to the following questions:
Who are your customers?
How can you reach them?
What do your customers need?
How would your customers benefit from your service/product?
How much would your customers be willing to pay for your offering?
Who are your competitors?
As you can see, these questions are customer-centric and focus on the end user rather than the business itself.
For business-to-customer services (B2C), the following factors need to be kept in mind:
Age
Gender
Location
Hobbies and interests
Income level
Social status
Ethnicity
Personality
Lifestyle
Interests and likes
For business-to-business (B2B) audiences, the following aspects should be considered:
Location
Industry
Business size
Business revenue
In the end, the more information you gather, the more accurate you will be in defining your target audience.
Research Techniques
The two most common research techniques employed to gather information about an intended audience are through:
Quantitative research
Qualitative research
Each of these methods will provide different kinds of data and insights to you about your potential customer. Let’s have a look at both and see what they have to offer.
Performing Qualitative Research
This research method is based around understanding experiences. As opposed to quantitative research, it is not generally focused on statistics and hard numbers. Rather, it focuses on insights on a small group of specific individuals.
Qualitative research is crucial in building buyer personas, an important aspect of marketing that we will discuss later on in this article.
Qualitative research can be carried out by:
Social listening. Social media sits at the forefront of any marketing strategy nowadays. Recognize how customers interact online and what they are saying about your business. This is a great source of gaining customer feedback.
Interviews. Interviews consist of one-on-one conversations between the researcher and the respondent. They contain a series of questions aimed at knowing the motivations and influences that urge a buyer to purchase your offering.
Focus groups. This process involves gathering a group of people and asking the participants to discuss your brand. Their interactions and opinions are then recorded.
Observations. Observations are typically carried out to gather information while a customer is using your product. The behavior of the user is recorded, revealing useful insights for the business.
Performing Quantitative Research
Quantitative research relies on stats and numbers. While qualitative research looks at specified data, the results of quantitative research are more generalized.
A few ways to gather quantitative data include:
Surveys. Surveys are a series of questions presented to a large body of people. They are easy to administer and can gather a large amount of data in a short amount of time.
Trend analysis. This analysis focuses on identifying specific trends in your industry. It involves comparing previous data to current data and extracting useful insights such as customer demographics, product performance, brand perceptions, and much more.
Data analysis. This involves taking your customers’ existing info in your database and performing an analysis on it. This step relies heavily on whether you even have quality information collected about your customers in the first place. Therefore, ensure that you are diligent in gathering useful and in-depth information about your users.
Form a Buyer Persona
Now that you have performed the research and collected detailed information on your target audience, it is now time to form buyer personas.
This step is extremely crucial in the success of any business's marketing campaign. It is a representation of your ideal customer based on the data you have collected from your market research.
A buyer persona helps you realize each step in a buyer’s journey. It tells you what to say, when to say it, and how.
Why is it Important to Create a Buyer Persona Even if You Already Have a Target Audience
Building a buyer persona gives you a target to aim for that is even more specific than a target audience. It helps a business view the customer as a real person instead of just an abstract audience, making the business’s interactions more meaningful with its customers. It provides a much more human and personal aspect for you to base your marketing strategies on.
Identify All the Personas You Want to Target
Your research will likely indicate that there are multiple buyer personas for your business. This is okay and you should tailor your marketing efforts to connect with each persona by segmenting them.
Analyze Each Buyer Persona in Detail
Buyer personas should be described in detail. Along with the basic info, you would include buyer aspects that are specific to each persona, such as interests, likes, dislikes, goals, personality traits, priorities, and so on.
Use Your Buyer Personas for Your Marketing Strategy
Once you have identified and created your buyer profiles, refer back to them regularly to base your digital marketing strategy around. Your digital marketing efforts, such as SEO, content development, and social media marketing should be designed around your ideal customer and what they would want.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Keeping an eye on your competitors is important for a number of reasons. It allows you to understand what your marketing needs to change and where you can improve and provide something that the other brand does not.
You are able to pinpoint what your competitors are and aren't doing well, how they are targeting their audience, and what their audiences are responding to. It is a great cost and time-effective way to learn about your target market without making the errors yourself.
Experiment with Updates to Your Content, Products, and Services
At the end of the day, the best way to know what your audience likes and dislikes is to actually release a product or service and notice their feedback.
To create an effective marketing strategy for the future, you will need to test out new ideas by putting out new products and offerings.
This will let you determine whether your business is successfully evolving with the ever-changing trends of today or has it grown stagnant.
Find ways to resonate with your audience, their pain points, and their interests. This will help improve retention rates and build loyal customers that will be responsible for the long-term growth of your business.
This will also help you pin down what to avoid for the future, saving you money in the long run.
The Bottom Line
Getting to know your audience is not always a simple process. It requires time and effort being put into the right areas. However, knowledge about one’s target audience sits at the core of every successful marketing strategy. It helps saves businesses against making financially damaging decisions that are going to hurt them and the longevity of their business.
For your business to work, you want to create products and services around what the buyer wants to buy. The people that will have the biggest impact on your success are your customers and those are the people you should strive to serve first and foremost with your marketing strategy.