Target your Audience for Fun and Profit

The Right Message for the Right Audience

Target your Audience for Fun and Profit

Not quite as awesome as buttered popcorn, frozen treats and streaming movies, but for a profit building exercise, this one’s pretty fun! You’ve probably heard about targeted marketing and personas. You might have thought about using these strategies for your own business, and you should. Now, more than ever before, targeted marketing is super important. In a time when communication and social channels inundate consumers with infinite options, a lot of brands are pushing their content into every outlet and mass marketing is at an all-time high.

It’s proven that businesses must have a clear definition of their target market to reach its ideal consumers. You must also be able to analyze your customers’ needs and provide products or services that fill those needs. Some brands seem to always get it right while others seem to miss the mark. Since there are so many information channels today, it’s all too easy to skip over any marketing or advertising that’s not relevant or useful. In our fast-paced, digital world of communication and infinite information, it’s not just profitable to streamline your marketing efforts, it’s necessary. Targeting audiences or consumers in your marketing program can minimize your cost of sale, increase ROI and grow conversions. Sounds great, right?

Done correctly, targeted marketing isn’t treated like an ad to the appropriate audience. If the consumer is shown relevant content that is interesting, informative or entertaining, the audience will happily accept the content, they will even go out of their way to find it. To engage your customer, you need to show them something they want to see.

Just as important as getting in front of the right audience, is giving the right message. With carefully targeted marketing campaigns, you can tailor your ad or content or even your products to your specific customer, reducing the cost of content creation and more rapidly moving the potential customer further along in the buying cycle. Since the audience will react best to something they want to see, you should spend your marketing focus on leveraging the product or service instead of attempting to engage all viewers.

Businesses must have a clear definition of their target market.

Define Your Audience, Tailor your Content

Target your Audience for Fun and Profit

Market segmentation usually includes audiences grouped by geographic, demographic/socioeconomic, psychographic, behavioral or product-related, or combinations and common denominators. The more precisely segmented, the more targeted your material can become and the greater return you will see from your marketing dollars. However, segmenting your market isn’t as easy as simply deciding who you want your consumer to be. They already exist and you might not know as much about your ideal customer as you think you do. Accurately segmenting your audience is the most important step. The most effective way to clearly define your target customer is to make personas. You might have heard personas referred to more specifically as “empathy maps”, “buyer personas”, “customer personas” or “customer profiles”. No matter what you call them, it’s important to remember that personas aren’t just for marketing; personas or similar tools can and should be implemented across your entire funnel strategy, throughout your organization and at all touchpoints.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. To grow, you need to intimately know your ideal customers and design your products, services and messaging to suit their needs and engage their interests. Creating very specific buyer personas can dramatically improve your business results. More and more, consumers expect to be given better experiences and presented with more options and specific products. Meeting these expectations more accurately and sooner than your competition will yield immediate results.

The sooner you start making and using personas, the sooner you will be able to reap the rewards of market segmenting and target audiences. Thanks to modern behaviors and information channels, nearly every product, brand and niche industry faces a world market. For B2B or B2C, tailoring your message is essential to be heard above the noise. Download our free eBook that walks you through the entire process, including creating personas and planning your content offers.

Buyer Personas ebook

Boost sales! Grow your brand!

Download our free eBook. Learn about, create and use buyer personas to design targeted campaigns with these tools and templates.
Target your audience, increase sales now!

    Erin and Rich