When it comes to marketing, a “one size fits all” approach is typically not the best tactic. Consumers today are looking for personalization. They want brands to understand their unique needs and wants and view them as individuals. Tailored messaging is imperative, as is delivering this message at the right time on the right platform. With literally thousands of brands competing for the same type of consumer, failing to offer a personalized approach will hurt your brand sooner or later.
No matter where your marketing strategy is currently, there are always areas for improvement. New technologies make it easier than ever to truly know your target demographic. Thanks to AI and data-driven methods, making your audience targeting more personal is achievable. Curious to know where to begin? Read on for four tips to help get you started.
1. Rely on Data to Predict Certain Actions
Rather than assuming where your target audience is spending their time or how they are spending their money, look at the data. Data-driven tactics can give you a higher ROI as they take logic and reason into account along with numerical evidence. Instead of guessing that your audience is on Instagram versus TikTok, you can come to the table with numerical proof.
By building a data-driven target audience, you’re able to better predict the types of actions these buyers are going to take. This is why leveraging predictive audiences can be advantageous. Predictive audiences are a newer development in the predictive analytics space, leaning into AI, machine learning, and first-party rather than third-party data. These audiences are built based on buyer’s behaviors, as well as preferences, spending habits, and content consumption.
With predictive audiences, you can build a segment of those that are likely to make a purchase within the next month. This pool of potential customers can be determined by how often they’ve returned to your site, what they’ve added to their cart, and if they’ve signed up for your newsletter. Knowing these types of behaviors can help you better identify and advertise to these users, thereby leading to a greater return on your marketing spend.
2. Create Audience-Based Personas
To reach your ideal audiences more effectively, it can be helpful to create audience-based personas, once again, based on data-driven insights. This type of persona takes into consideration market research as well as data points that are important for your ideal customer. An audience-based persona is semi-fictional, however, you are making educated assumptions based on customer and buyer behaviors.
When it comes to creating your persona, you want to be detailed and thorough. As a gauge, think about the amount of information found on a typical dating profile. It should include basic demographic information such as gender, age, and family life. Additionally, you also want to include their needs, major pain points, and motivators. Think of all areas of their life from their psychographics to their interests and hobbies.
Having this persona on hand helps you create a more personalized approach to your targeting. You’ll know what kinds of marketing language, for instance, speaks to them and how to best reach them. Before launching a new campaign, ask yourself if your tactics will be relevant to your persona. If not, that’s a good sign that you need to either go back to the drawing board or pivot to make it more applicable.
3. Conduct Surveys
One of the best ways to know what your target audience wants is to ask them directly. Surveys and polls can help you gather actionable insights. These can influence future marketing campaigns as well as your content marketing plans and even product development. Collecting this data is known as primary market research; this is opposed to secondary market research where you’re tapping into pre-existing data.
When conducting a research survey, it’s important to be detail-oriented. The questions you ask and even how you ask them can influence the results. Instead of asking a string of random questions, give your survey a purpose. For example, don’t ask users about your branding and then switch over to your customer service. Several more niche surveys are oftentimes more beneficial than one larger lump sum survey.
Once the data is collected, you can use it to segment your audience via a more personalized approach. You’ll be able to group your target audiences by commonalities, thereby creating smaller more focused interest groups. You can then create more targeted messaging for each group to drive conversions and increase engagement.
Takeaways
Targeting the right audiences ensures that your marketing dollars are well spent. And a personalized targeting approach assures that your messaging is reaching those in the right mindset to respond. With this, you’ll build stronger relationships with current customers alongside potentially new customers. This can lead to better brand awareness, brand recognition, and ultimately brand loyalty.
Of course, everyone changes and your audience’s needs may also change over time. Keep in mind that refining and enhancing your audience targeting is an important part of the process. Referring back to the data, honing your persona, and conducting additional surveys can be valuable to your overall marketing strategy.
