Targeting the right set audience is extremely crucial to the success of your business. As they said, marketing has always been about connecting with the right audience in the right place and at the right time.
Otherwise, if you are not reaching the right audience, then all your digital marketing efforts – from SEO and PPC to social media and content marketing – have no point and your budget is just going down the drain. By finding and reaching the right audience, you can tailor your messages to appeal specifically to that segment, which then increases your chance of getting their attention.
Reaching the desired target audience is so important that in fact, many companies consider this as a key factor for their campaign effectiveness, and therefore allocate a significant portion of their market research budget for this function alone.
For instance, companies in the textile industry closely monitor trends and consumer behavior in the global cotton yarn market to tailor their marketing efforts accordingly.
According to Forbes Insights report, 43% of companies spend more than half of their budgets reaching specific targets., and 84% of companies expect that investment to increase over the years to come
If you are planning to invest significantly in audience targeting, then read on as we detail in this infographic the steps that will help you ensure that you reach the right online target audience for your digital marketing campaign.
1. Understand What Your Business Offering is All About
Knowing what your product or service is all about is the first step to discover who you should be targeting. What particular challenge does your offering helps address? Who would benefit the most from what you have to offer? What are the unique features of your product? Is your product effective yet affordable? Answering these questions will help you figure out who should be the receiving end of your digital marketing efforts.
If you are already in the business, you can easily identify your target audience by analyzing the characteristics of your best customers. Your best customers share common traits and interest which your existing marketing strategy may already have able to match. If you think you have the best chance of growing with these type customers, then you must uncover more information about them to start building an audience persona
2. Build Your Audience Persona
Audience persona refers to the basic profile of your target audience. It basically details the lifestyle, habits, interests, needs and conducts the audience your business is attracting. When building an audience persona for digital marketing purposes, you need to take into account these three factors:
- Demographics: Race, ethnicity, gender, age, education, profession, occupation, income level, and marital status, etc.
- Psychographics: Buyer’s habits, hobbies, spending habits and values.
- Technographic: Information regarding the technology adoption and usage habits of the customer, e. what mobile device they use, their most frequently-visited websites, their social media habits, etc.
All these information play a crucial role in building an accurate audience persona; the demographic information will detail the basic information about your typical audience, the psychographic information describes their reasoning for potential engagement with your brand, and the technographic information will help you deliver the right content based on the device or equipment they are using.
3. Monitor Audience Analytics
To better understand your online target audience, you should learn how to take advantage of audience analytics. Audience analytics is a platform which helps businesses to determine the kind of content to serve up in the future based on the what content their target audience consume, when they consume it, and for how long.
With audience analytics, you can uncover several valuable data sets which can further improve the profile of your audience persona, such as:
- Referrers – This refers to places online that sends traffic to your website, including organic search, direct traffic, other websites, and social media. This information will help you understand where you need to focus your efforts to reach more target audience.
- Device Usage Breakdown – Knowing the device your target audience is using to visit your website can help you select the right content to promote and the format you need to use to ensure good online experience.
- Popular content – Knowing the website content your target audience is looking for on your website will help you develop more content that matches their preferences and needs.
4. Reach Out to Niche Websites and Relevant Influencers
With all the noise in the online landscape, it is not enough to just post all your personalized content in your website and hope that your target audience will find it. Reaching out to niche websites and tapping the power of influencer marketing can help you to reach your desired audience as quickly and easy as possible.
Conduct research about the most popular websites relevant to your business and pitch them for a guest post. Doing so will not only expose your brand to a new set of pertinent audience, but it will also increase your chance of getting high-quality traffic that converts.
The same process applies when using influencers. However, it is also important to know the goal you want to achieve with them. Do you want them to increase brand awareness or drive more sales? Regardless of your goal, make sure you communicate it clearly with the influencer you want to work with to ensure the effective delivery of your campaign.
5. Use Social Listening Tools
In order to ensure long-term success with your target audience, it is essential that you still hone your audience profile continuously. One way to do this is to use social listening tools like BuzzSumo, Mention, Twitter and Facebook hashtags, or HootSuite.
With social listening, you can discover topics that your target audience are talking about. Once you identify a certain topic, you can check the profile of the users participating in the conversation to understand their interest and preferences on a general level. This will provide you with valuable insights which you can use to streamline further the audience persona you should be targeting.
Overall, while most customers are online nowadays, that doesn’t mean that all of them are going to be interested in what you have to offer. Hopefully, with all these steps taken, you will be able to identify the right audience that is most relevant to your business, and ultimately be able to focus your efforts to get those people to convert into loyal followers and customers of your brand.
Jomer B. Gregorio is a well-rounded expert when it comes digital marketing. Jomer is also known as a semantic SEO evangelist and practitioner. Check out our Digital Marketing Services today and let us help you in achieving positive and profitable results for your business.