The Importance of Effectively Targeting Your Customers
Knowing who your target audience and customers are is a huge asset to you as a digital marketer. It is important that you learn how to put your customers into groups based on their interests and similarities. This includes their purchasing behavior across platforms, where they most often interact with your brand, etc. Knowing where and when to direct your marketing efforts can help you make the most of your time and budget. In digital marketing especially, it is important to understand the buyer’s journey and their behavior online. This can make targeting more difficult on the digital side of things. That’s why the team at Lyv Marketing is here to help you learn about your audience and figure out where to exert most of your effort.
Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a pretty common thing in all types of marketing, not just digital. It is a description of the ideal customer for your brand/product. This doesn’t have to be just one person, and it usually isn’t. Buyer personas should encompass all of the different kinds of customers you expect to see shopping with you. These personas help you figure out who to target with your strategies not just in marketing, but in sales as well. And then, from there, you can segment your audience into groups. Some things to consider about your audience when forming these groups include…
Their occupation
Their age
Their hobbies/what they do in their free time
Their average salary
Their geographical location
Customer Segmentation
Audience segmentation refers to separating your audience into groups based on the answers to all of the questions listed above. These segments are a huge part of your marketing strategy. It is more important to the digital marketing space because of how much choice there is online. Traditional marketing is a bit different in terms of attracting audiences. The challenge in digital marketing is to catch people in the process of their buying decision. Now that we’ve defined and explained the importance of segmentation, it's time to figure out how to start doing it effectively.
Customer Behavior
The way you segment established buyers and new buyers should be different. This is because in this case we know one of these customers has an established knowledge of the brand and the other will be finding it for the first time. For the previous buyer, you want to analyze what they’ve already purchased and what they might come back to you for. For the new customer, you want to help them find what they’re looking for as seamlessly as possible. Look at the key online/social platforms that previous and new customers visit. Knowing where people are finding you and your products/services helps you a lot in terms of how and where to target them. This is also another way you can continue to build your customer segments. These traits and online activity are good ways to keep creating the groups that will receive different marketing efforts and strategies.
The Importance of Psychographics
While it is important to take personality traits, demographics, and online activity into account when creating your customer segments, it is arguably even more important to analyze cultural values and lifestyle choices. If your product/service caters to peoples’ interests or hobbies, you have to take into account someone’s lifestyle. Over the years, advertising platforms have evolved and are able to make more sense of the information presented by someone’s activity online. Now, meta ads can be targeted to people based on their interests online. And, with the creation of so many new algorithms, apps like TikTok can show people organic content from brands that they would be interested in based on previous app activity. Psychographics consider more about someone's preferences and interests rather than factors that describe them. It calls for marketers to dig deeper into their customers and analyze them more deeply.
Useful Tools to Target Well
When we’re discussing targeting techniques, it is important to note that you don’t have to do all of this manually. There are tools out there that streamline this process. These tools are used to make your segments and then target/retarget your audiences. They can use analytics to judge what is working and alter your targeting. These tools are available for purchase or monthly subscription, but are also offered on a platform-to-platform basis. For example, Google and Meta offer their own targeting tools for their respective platforms and HubSpot has a CRM that can manage your analytics on many different social media platforms and websites.
Takeaway: Segmentation is Essential for Digital Marketers
Making sure your marketing efforts are directed at the right audiences will help your marketing campaigns and ideas to flourish. If you think that your marketing strategies are well-based in research and you are still not seeing results, you just may not be reaching the right people. By analyzing not only your audience’s characteristics, but also their lifestyle and values, you can meet them where they are and help them find your brand. The team at Lyv Marketing is here to help you reach these customers, both old and new. Contact us today on our website at ww.lyvmarketing.com or give us a call at (814) 419-4931.
