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Stop Missing Your Marketing Targets
Your business’ success is heavily influenced by your marketing. Similarly, your marketing’s success is heavily influenced by how accurately your marketing reaches who you want to be talking to… your prospects and even your current clients, your target audiences. They need your marketing to show them that your values align with theirs and that you’ll be invested in their success.
Let’s talk about how you can make sure it does so.
To Reach Your Target Audience, You Need to Know Them
It really is as simple as that. To talk to your target audience, you need to know who they are.
You should know whether you want a marketing effort to talk to your suspects, prospects, leads, or even existing clients. This is important, but we can do more by just digging a little deeper and defining who it really is that you’re targeting.
To do so, knowing your own company from all angles is important. Can you answer the following questions about your company?
- What do we do to solve problems for our customers and clients?
When did you last check that all of your marketing team members were on board and locked on with your company’s mission? Everyone must understand this to define who will most likely benefit from your company's offerings. Otherwise, your marketing efforts could be directed to poor fits, wasting time and money for your business.
- Who are our customers and clients, and what do we know about them?
Building off the last question, you must lock down who you are trying to talk to and how to communicate with them most effectively. Get to know who they are and what their interests are so you can connect with them. Figure out their age demographics, where they are located, what content they respond best to, and everything else that might impact how your efforts are shaped. Having this information about those you are trying to communicate with is key to selecting the correct marketing efforts to use.
- How will our offering help them?
It’s one thing for your prospects and clients to have needs and for you to have solutions. It’s quite another for you to help them connect the two. Your responsibility is to display the value that you can give them. Take the time to dig into their challenges to understand their real obstacles and examine their opportunities to help them capitalize optimally on them. This will help give you extra ammunition for your marketing efforts.
- Which offerings of ours are the best?
In other words, what do you do that a prospect or client could only get by working with you? This would include any specialties your company has in serving different industries, which can be used greatly in targeted marketing efforts… especially when paired with some glowing testimonials from members of these industries. This means you need to understand what your business can provide and what the alternatives can. That brings us to the final question:
- What alternatives do our clients and prospects have to consider?
You can’t assume that your prospects—even your clients—aren’t going to look around at what is available. You need to be aware of what your competitors are doing if you’re going to stand out and stand above them. After all, you are competing with them for your audience’s attention, so understanding them and how they operate will be key.
Once You Know Your Audience, You Need to Reach Them
With plenty of avenues for you to take advantage of—from blogs, newsletters, letters, testimonials, and many others—you need to determine which will be most effective for you to utilize, both in terms of your financial investments and the engagement they accomplish with your audience. Keeping track of your metrics and adapting your efforts as they go will be extremely helpful to this goal.
Let’s talk about some of these avenues.
Social Media Keeps Your Brand in Front of Your Audience
If you want a way to continuously keep your brand in front of your audience, it’s hard to beat social media. Regardless of the platform you use, doing so can cost your business anywhere from “nothing” to “very little,” with you having the opportunity to maintain it organically or use the boosting capabilities that social platforms offer. Plus, social media gives you metrics to take advantage of, allowing you to see how your efforts are performing. That said, social media can be time-consuming to utilize as it requires you to engage with others.
While there are services out there that help automate your social media activities—thereby allowing you to schedule posts weeks in advance—we recommend that you also share “of-the-moment” content to connect with your followers on a more personal level. These posts are also more likely to be shared by your followers (another benefit social media offers).
Newsletters Establish Trust and Inform
Whether you use a printed version or an e-newsletter delivered to an inbox, a newsletter is an excellent way to impress your audience. Consistently sending these newsletters, filled with helpful information, offers enough value to offset the cost. As with any email correspondence, you need to secure permission to send an e-newsletter.
Newsletters can also be easily tracked for success via QR codes and shortened URLs, which help draw visitors back to your website, too.
Social Proof
Social proof is a great asset to have as you market your services, albeit in a different way than the other marketing methods we’ve discussed thus far. Collecting testimonials that outline your successes with existing clients and what you’ve helped them accomplish helps reinforce the impression of reliability you want to cultivate. Similarly, referrals help to considerably shorten the time it takes to convert a prospect to a client, as the recommendation is coming from a business associate who has seen success already.
Social proof can be leveraged in various ways. For instance, testimonials can be in either written or video form and shared through social media, direct mail efforts, or any avenue you can think of. Referrals can be the driving force of entire marketing campaigns.
However You Do It, Your Marketing Needs to Be On Target
Marketing is essential to your success… provided that you’re marketing to the right audience. You need to relate to them, so talk to them the way you’d want to be spoken to.
It will help to look at it this way: as a business owner, what would convince you?
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