Understand your audience for smart digital marketing

The days of blanket marketing in which you hope the right people see your product are gone. Especially in the online marketing world, you need to know who your customer is, so you can market to them as strategically as possible. Today the Zebra 360 Social Media Marketing Agency team breaks down how to understand your audience- the right way. 

What understanding brings you

With the right understanding of your audience, you can create digital marketing strategies that work, grab the share of the marketplace you deserve, and make your marketing ROI soar. But it’s important to understand it’s also a job that’s never done. You will always be tweaking and updating this profile- or you risk brand stagnation. So how do you build useful and accurate buyer personas to market to the right audience? Let’s take a look.

  1. Research

Obviously, we start with the research. To begin with, you need to know your target audience- the people most interested in buying your product. Don’t let this stay nebulous and open-ended. No, you don’t want to limit yourself, but also no, not everyone will buy your product. Wasting time marketing to people who will never bite is just a waste. Make sure the profile you build is:

  • Data-backed: Don’t assume. Let accurate data drive the profile.
  • Specific: This data will give you a specific picture of who buys your product. Define that person.
  • Customer-focused: Who wants to engage with YOU? This is not about who you think you want to engage WITH. Work back from the people who already feel they get something from your business. 

Now you know the WHO, you can work out the best method to reach them- and won’t waste time where you won’t find them, either. This also means you can overhaul your brand identity to be attractive to them. In fact, you will also be able to use this data for future product development, too. Knowing your audience lets you meet their needs as well as telling you where the products they love are bought and sold. You can investigate:

  • What motivates purchases
  • Price points that are optimal
  • How they already buy
  • What triggers purchases
  • The journey to purchase
  • The trade-offs that make them choose you
  • Buying behaviour they use
  • Gap analysis
  • Market demand

 Now you have what you need for a meaningful marketing strategy, it’s time to segment them.

  1. Segmentation

Chances are you don’t have one holistic audience. Now you know the broad strokes of your target demographics, you will group like people together, and segmentaize them so that a similar response to specific marketing can be expected. 

Not only does this give you even further insight into your target audience, but you can also find new insights into how to interest them in your product. You can also see what’s important to specific customers, and where you are underdelivering. 

There’s many possible segments you could use, but who makes decisions, the last time they interacted with you, characteristics of how they behave, social media influences, geography, and demographics are all common. 

  1. The Buyer Persona

Now you create a buyer persona. A semi-fictional person built from your data. This character gives you insights at every step of the marketing journey. You can project what’s in their mind when they approach you. You can uncover what to say to convert them to a consumer. It can tell you the service they need to close the deal. And it can tell you how to wow them going forward and retain them as a customer for life. 

Many people confuse this with the target audience. It’s subtle, but this is not the varied people in your demographics. It’s a specific way to personalize one of your segments, so you can market well to them. 

A segment may, say, be young single South African men who like to travel, earn R10,000-R20,000 a month, own pets they travel with, and like adventure sports. But you will create Travelling Thabo, an ambitious young 24-year old bookkeeper who has one large dog, lives in Jozi, likes to surf with Fido when he travels, and hopes to find a girlfriend with the same tastes and interests within the year. 

This character lets you better create and imagine the marketing that will best work for your demographics, giving you a better insight into your target audiences. In turn, you can create personalized, compelling online marketing efforts that have better outcomes for your customers and company alike. 

When you determine your audience for digital marketing the right way, you can truly harness the power of digital strategy to enhance your marketing efforts. Not sure where to start? The talented team at Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency are always on hand to help you boost your business.