Are You Marketing to the Right Audience? by lisafugere

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Are You Marketing to the Right Audience?
by lisafugere

the confusionSocial media and marketing automation technology make it easy to grow your marketing reach, but don't always make it easy to target the right audience. Our customers are out there everywhere, but knowing exactly where isn't yet a perfect art. A few practices, however, can help you understand your customers.
Expand Your Targeting Criteria

Most database targeting centers around titles or locations. Grow your criteria. The technology exists to target based on a number of other criteria. Targeting campaigns has never been more precise than it is today; don't waste space on the Internet marketing to the world when you could be marketing to the people you want to reach.

    Figure out what needs to happen for your client to buy your products in the shortest amount of time possible. For example, if you sell legal management software, organizations and individuals in the midst of legal action are most likely to purchase your products. Find out which instances create the quickest transactions. Clients on the verge of bankruptcy, for instance, might not move as quickly as clients facing lawsuits from employees. Once you determine the exact activities that trigger purchase behavior, fine tune it so you have the exact phrases that inspire purchases. If you need help, check Google Analytics searches for words with significant SEO value. When you have the exact phrases that create customer behavior, you won't only reach prospects with the right profiles, you'll reach prospects at the right time. With the right phrases, you can go to Twitter with stronger key words for promoted tweets; you can target Facebook and LinkedIn searches better; you can build more effective retargeting ads, etc.
    Find out where from where your highest converting clients reach you. If you don't know which social media service drives the most traffic to your corporate blog, how will you convert any of the leads you get there? Amp up your marketing efforts in the areas your customers spend the most time. Building marketing campaigns across every platform you have is great for some campaigns, but not for campaigns that are more relevant to some of your prospects than others.
    Include social media criteria in your CRM and marketing automation systems. You can create lists from your database for campaign targeting based solely on their presence on certain social networks, and you can also create emails for prospects and customers based on their social activity.

Is it better to promote broadly targeting campaigns or highly targeted campaigns?

We think you need both. There's not a successful marketing department out there that isn't strapped for resources today, but it's incredibly important to market the right content to the right customers. If you use broad content to draw in a high volume of leads, what's your plan to convert those leads? If you create highly targeted content that caters to very specific customer needs, how will you draw in new business? If you have an answer to both those questions, you're marketing to the right audience.