Targeted Marketing Strategies and Benefits
Understanding what an organization’s customers want and need allows it to connect with them in a way that positions it as not only a solution provider but also a trusted and knowledgeable connection. Further analyzing a brand’s broader audience to identify smaller groups with common factors — segmenting the customer base — enables an organization to develop and direct particular marketing efforts toward smaller, more specific groups.
Targeted marketing allows businesses to create more effective lead conversion strategies for smaller segments with shared, predetermined traits. Delineating these segments and their mutual characteristics can be done in various ways and with differing degrees of granularity. Once identified, these smaller slices of an offering’s target audience allow for tailored marketing efforts, resulting in a more significant marketing ROI.
Targeted Marketing Techniques
Segmenting an audience into smaller groups may be challenging. Developing buyer personas of ideal customers through careful research will allow a sales and marketing teams to identify shared motivations, interests, habits, and other characteristics. This information can then be used to determine which keywords and specialized language customers use when searching for products related to a specific offering.
This will give valuable insight into the kind of shared characteristics a buyer persona would model and will help a sales team establish possible buying patterns. Buyer personas and all associated information should be reviewed regularly to ensure their continued relevance and enhance lead generation efforts.
Types of Target Audience Segmentation
Audiences can be divided into segments depending on what metrics may be strategic. These segments can be organized by demographic indicators such as gender or age, for instance, in marketing products like cosmetics or women’s clothing.
Offerings such as boating or fishing equipment suggest audience segmentation along geographic lines. Marketing efforts are then focused on buyers who live near large bodies of water or in other suitable locations.
Other segments can be developed around such factors as customer habits or a buyer’s journey from the top of the funnel to conversion. Studying buying behavior or typical UX interactions can determine what factors influence product purchase decisions. Optimized marketing content and strategies based on these factors can then be developed and deployed.
Segment-Focused Targeted Marketing
Once a company has determined the product’s audience segments to focus its marketing efforts, material targeted directly to these segments can be developed. For instance, an audience segment’s interests and hobbies can inform content marketing efforts that are instructional or educational. Effective keyword and SEO strategies can then be integrated into this content to ensure higher SERP placement.
Social media posts and advertisements can be crafted to have the broadest possible appeal to one or more segmented audiences. Paid social media ad placement can directly target the desired audience segment, driving engagement and conversion.
Similarly, paid search can be used to attract users to a brand website or specific product landing page. Determining the correct keywords or industry terms a preferred audience segment uses when searching for products related to a brand’s offerings is essential. This information can then inform paid search engine advertising efforts. Paid ads appearing at the top of the SERP can be used to target specific audience segments directly.
Targeted Marketing Benefits and Advantages
Targeted marketing brings with it many inherent advantages. Specialized or tailored content geared toward specific or segmented audiences is much more cost-effective, allowing for a more direct path from lead generation to conversion. Customers attracted by or interested in specific content or information relating to a particular audience segment display greater engagement, which is typically evident in optimized PPC costs. Leads who have viewed retargeting ads are also 70% more likely to convert on your site.
Content created for a specific audience segment results in greater organic engagement and robust brand awareness and promotes the perception of greater brand or product value. Deeper consumer connections from specific targeted marketing efforts result in increased customer satisfaction and more significant marketing ROI. A display ad retargeted at a specific audience segment, for example, can produce a 1000% lift in search volume relative to other ad strategies.
Targeted marketing efforts are received more favorably by consumers attracted to specific content relevant to their interests. These customers will generally patronize brands or companies associated with their interests more favorably than larger, less specific advertisements created with larger, more diverse audiences in mind.
Effective Targeted Marketing
With accurate and detailed buyer persona research and development, content marketing material explicitly created for a narrow audience segment, and optimized and strategic audience segmentation criteria, target marketing strategies offer considerable benefits over more traditional, generic marketing.
Targeted marketing requires research into and the development of robust buyer personas and content marketing efforts specifically geared toward the shared interests common among particular audience segments. Overall, targeted marketing is only as effective as these efforts and requires regular review and reassessment of buyer persona data to ensure optimal efficacy.
